In a Vanity Fair piece that reads like fiction, Mark Seal tells the story of a man who conned his way to the top of American society, while trying to answer this question: How could one man, born in Germany, an immigrant to America in the late 1970s, be so many people—and none of them?

Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today

Jacqui Banaszynski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now is an endowed Knight Chair professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Last semester, her Advanced Writing students at Missouri chose stories they liked and gave them the Storyboard treatment. We’re pleased to post their efforts.

Seal drops us into the life of the man born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter near the end of his time as “Clark Rockefeller,” then takes us on a suspenseful journey through all of Gerhartsreiter’s many identities, spinning the reader into the personas of a professional faker.

It’s long—well over 10,000 words—but Seal does such a remarkable job seamlessly moving from false identity to false identity, weaving us deeper into the con story, that it never felt like a task to plow through the story. He couldn’t have found a more interesting or complicated story to tell, but he easily navigates the twisted and complex details.

Seal helps us get to know Gerhartsreiter and all his many identities without ever talking to the man himself. He interviews a hairdresser who knew “Christopher Chichester” as a charmer who swept through the well-off community of San Marino, California. Rich socialites on the east coast who knew “Clark Rockefeller” as a loving father. Former coworkers of “Christopher Crowe” who knew he was a fraud but unsure to what degree.

As Seal guides us through each of Gerhartsreiter’s identities, he makes us believe that anyone could’ve been duped by this master of disguise — and simultaneously makes the master a sympathetic character.

Seal makes his best decision in crafting the story by slipping from one Gerhartsreiter identity to the next without a hiccup. He notes the morphing of identities by introducing a new persona as “Aka Clark Rockefeller,” and from there, the story shifts to encapsulate the next carefully crafted identity. It’s a smart choice on Seal’s part because it puts the reader in Gerhartsreiter’s timeline.

Mark Seal tells the story of a man who conned his way to the top of American society, while trying to answer this question: How could one man, born in Germany, an immigrant to America in the late 1970s, be so many people—and none of them?

Gerhartsreiter’s most famous identity, Clark Rockefeller, ultimately was his undoing. It was when he was Clark Rockefeller that he met his ex-wife, Sandra Boss.

By the time Seal introduces Boss, we have such a good sense of Gerhartsreiter that their coming-together makes perfect sense. When Rockefeller met Boss, he threw her a “Clue” party, after the board game that tries to have the players guess who killed Mr. Boddy. Rockefeller was Professor Plum, and Boss was Miss Scarlett.

“Immediately, Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett were attracted to each other, initially through their mutual love of business and their admiration of each other’s intelligence. In addition, friends say, Sandra fell in love with Clark because he made her laugh. Like Rockefeller, Sandra Boss was on her own journey of re-invention. Her father was a Boeing engineer, and she had grown up upper-middle-class in Seattle, “in a nice two-story Cape Cod house with a finished basement,” says a friend. There, she started to develop what would become her defining trait.”

Boss acts as a guide through the last quarter of the story, leading to the scene that opens the piece: Gerhartsreiter kidnapping his own daughter, whom he calls “Snooks.”

Seal introduces scenes that are centered on Boss and give context to the kidnapping scene, showing how worried she is about her missing daughter. In an especially effective tactic, Seal contrasts Boss’ sanity with Gerhartsreiter’s downward spiral.

Seal finishes the tale by looping back to the beginning, after Snooks is kidnapped. But this time he leads the story to its end, after the FBI catches the imposter. Seal slowly shifts the focus away from Gerhartsreiter to the woman and child who are left to deal with all his secret identities.

“As for Sandra Boss, is she an innocent victim or a simple enabler? She insists through her spokesman that she is the former, the ultimate dupe in an elaborate web of lies, living for 12 years with a man she knew only as Clark Rockefeller. How could this high-powered Stanford graduate and Harvard M.B.A. not have known? How could she marry, and remain married to, a Rockefeller who had no identification, employment history, or visible means of support?”

Even though we don’t know the fate that awaits Gerhartsreiter (at the time the story was published, he hadn’t yet been convicted of murder in a case from an earlier identity) Seal ends the larger-than-life tale with an ending that seems a bit more like reality: with Boss, and the damage Gerhartsreiter left in his wake.

“She’s doing her best to forget all that. She has a new life in London, and she wants to leave her former life behind, just as her ex-husband so often did.”

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-mark-seal-and-the-man-in-the-rockefeller-suit/feed/0Annotation Tuesday! Rachel Monroe and “Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone?”http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-rachel-monroe-and-have-you-ever-thought-about-killing-someone/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-rachel-monroe-and-have-you-ever-thought-about-killing-someone/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 16:00:21 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127489Rachel Monroe has two journalistic obsessions: crime and utopia. She’s fascinated by how people deal with extreme situations, when the stakes are high and things fall apart. The two aren’t even so different, she observes: “Utopia always contains within it the seed of disaster or failure.”

Fantasy and crime merged in her April 2015 story in Matter, Medium’s now-defunct publication. It’s a deeply disturbing piece about a middle-aged man who fantasizes about being murdered, and a high-school kid named Mike Baker who decides to oblige him. Monroe became obsessed with figuring out what had happened and why — and confronted the limits to how well we can know someone else’s mind.

I spoke with Monroe about her wild story and life in Marfa, a tiny arts hub in the desert of West Texas. Monroe moved there in 2012 from Baltimore, after finishing an MFA and starting to freelance full time. Since drifting away from fiction, she has written for Oxford American, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and others, often about life in small towns.

The events in the story took place more than 15 years ago. How did you come across it?

It was barely in the news at all, which is so crazy. It was pre-Internet, before people were trolling the wires looking for crazy-sounding crimes. I was reading a book on a camping trip called “Death in Big Bend,” about people who have died in Big Bend National Park. It most mostly exposure and lightning strikes, and then there’s the story of this crazy murder told in this deadpan style. I just wanted to know more. When I came back to Marfa, I found out a friend had gone to school with Mike Baker. I thought, why not write a letter to this guy in prison.

Is that where your ideas generally come from — serendipity?

I became so obsessed with this story that I did anything I could to get a sense of who Shannon Robert— the guy who was murdered — was.

It’s a kind of cultivated serendipity: Keeping feelers out, paying attention, reading a wide range of things, keeping up with those corners of the universe that I think a story might come out of. I end up putting a lot of feelers out that don’t turn into anything. But I do feel like my favorite stories to write and those that are most successful are the ones where there is some real personal affinity — some magic or charisma — between me and the subject. You can’t know that until you’re relatively far in; it’s so hard to predict. The person has to want to tell me their story, have something they want to explain, which Mike Baker definitely did.

This story was insane, but it wasn’t recent or tied to the news. Was it hard to sell?

It was a year between when I sent my first (unsuccessful) pitch and when the piece was published. When I first sent it to a few places, people would say, “That sounds like a crazy story, but we don’t really see what it’s about other than what it’s about.” Or “there’s not really a news peg.” Or “it’s strange and interesting, but it seems cut and dried narrative-wise.” It doesn’t fit into a typical miscarriage of justice or “I was wrong” narrative. Working with Matter gave me some freedom in how to tell the story because they weren’t a long-established place with a set voice and conventions.

What was it like writing a story in which one of the main characters is dead?

I became so obsessed with this story that I did anything I could to get a sense of who Shannon Robert— the guy who was murdered — was. The only things I had about him were from police interviews and one family friend who knew him. I tried so hard to track down other people who had known him, but the police files were redacted. I went on eBay and found a copy of an out-of-print book the University of Idaho had published about his father’s sculptures. Because so much of my information was from Mike Baker and his friends, I tried to make it clear that the portrait of Shannon we were getting was through their eyes and not necessarily an accurate or full representation. I tried to do it in a voice that made Baker become something of an unreliable narrator. It was necessarily an incomplete record, and it’s definitely a strange and tender spot in the story.

Why did you move to Marfa, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere? What’s it like being a freelance journalist there?

After I finished my MFA and was no longer adjuncting, I knew I needed to leave Baltimore. I was a freelancer and didn’t have a partner, so I could live anywhere. I spent close to a year going on road trips and staying with friends and thinking: Could I live here? I thought that I was going to move to Los Angeles, and on my drive out there I stopped in Marfa and really liked it. I was not planning to move to a little town in Texas.

Usually, it’s a blessing. Somewhere like New York always seems like too much competition, too many outside voices. It’s very easy to for me to get all that in my head. It felt good to be away from that and live somewhere that’s a lot cheaper. I feel grateful that I’m exposed to different people who are interested in different topics. For example, I joined the volunteer fire department and have written a number of stories about first responders, which is something I’d never paid attention to. In terms of process, I feel like I have a lot more time in my day. I think I still procrastinate just as much but I get more done. I’ve gotten really attached to the freedom of being here.

My questions are in red, her responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button.

Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone?

On a warm day in March 2000, national park ranger Cary Brown woke up early and decided he might as well go ahead and start his patrol. Big Bend, where Brown was stationed, is located in Far West Texas, with the thin green ribbon of the Rio Grande serving as the border with Mexico. It’s one of America’s least-visited national parks, a remote and sunbaked place whose martian landscape of sharp canyons and sudden outcroppings implies some deep-buried geological violence.
I absolutely love this description. Do phrases and sentences like this come to you in one fell swoop, or do you chip away until you find the exact right word, the poetic phrase?
Sometimes a phrase or an image pops into my brain like a little gift. But it’s rarely a complete thought, so the work becomes figuring out how to stitch the little gifts together into something coherent.

Not long after sunrise, on the park’s main road, Brown pulled over a pickup with a suspicious tarp-covered load in its bed. There were two men inside the cab. When he peeked under the tarp, he found blocks of marijuana, about 400 pounds of it. As Brown started to arrest the driver, the passenger reached under the seat, grabbed a bottle of water, and sprinted off into the desert.

A group of rangers set out on horseback to look for the runaway drug smuggler later that morning. Deep into the search, in a remote part of the park near Dagger Flat, one of them spied an incongruous scrap of color in the desert. When they got closer, they could make out a red blanket and, nearby, a human skull and upper torso protruding from what looked to be a hastily dug grave. The search for the runaway was immediately called off. All the park’s investigative resources were diverted to the new body.

“It’s amazing that we found him at all,” Brown told me. “Nobody ever goes out there, it’s the most remote part of the park. Maybe years later somebody would’ve stumbled on some bones, but they would’ve been all strewn out. We were lucky. He had only been dead around six weeks when we found him.”
Did it take some convincing for the ranger to talk to you?
I live near Big Bend and knew some rangers who knew him, and I think that personal connection helped.

The man was still wearing the clothes he had died in — a denim shirt with the word “Magic” embroidered over the left pocket. At the bottom of the grave was a pair of green, black, and purple Nikes, size 13. Investigators collected scattered bones, cigarette butts, and a shovel from around the site. Several things about the scene seemed strange to Brown. The body was partially wrapped in chicken wire. Even more inexplicably, there were aluminum stakes driven into the ground around the grave, even though the land’s slope made it exactly the wrong kind of place to pitch a tent.

This close to the border, most violent crimes are at first considered drug-related. But the carefully staged scene — the deep grave, the blanket covering the body, those mysterious tent stakes — didn’t resemble a typical drug murder. And while visitors to the park occasionally died of natural causes in remote areas, that didn’t seem to be the case here, either.

The depth of the grave pointed to an intentional death. Perhaps it could’ve been a strange, ritualistic suicide — except for one problem. “It was obvious he didn’t bury himself,” Brown said.
Did you mean to set this up as a sort of murder mystery? It reminds me of the opening scene in a “Law & Order” episode (which is a compliment).
I love “Law & Order!” I’ll know I’ve made it when a story I’ve written gets the L&O treatment. It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. It starts out as a murder mystery, but then the story ends up being something very different than a whodunit, I think.

***

If he had known then what he knows today, thanks to more than a decade spent among the perverts and neo-Nazis and idiots and masterminds of federal prison, Mike Baker would have been able to tell exactly what Doc was the first time he set eyes on him. That’s one thing you can say about being locked up: It’s a great way to learn about human nature. But back then — San Antonio, the summer of 1997 — Baker was fresh out of Christian school, where they taught you parables and prophets — nothing actually useful, like how to spot a creep or tell when a situation was getting out of hand. If they had, maybe things would’ve turned out differently; maybe Baker wouldn’t have taken even a single step into Doc’s cluttered apartment, with its distinctive, unwashed-laundry smell. He’d have turned around and found someone else to buy him cigarettes, or just stolen the fucking cigarettes for God’s sake.
Do you try to adapt your narrative voice to reflect the characters in your story even when you’re not quoting them?
It’s definitely not a technique that works for every story, but it seemed important to do in this case. So much of the information about what Doc was like comes from Baker and his friends, and is colored by what happened afterward, and it seemed important to imply that we’re seeing all this through their eyes, and that we should take all the info we get from them with a certain amount of skepticism. Plus, Baker has such a distinct and funny writing voice in the emails he sent to me; I think this was also my attempt at paying tribute to that.

His then-girlfriend is the one who introduces them.
Why do you switch to the present tense here?
Hmm, good question. I guess it sounds as though Baker is telling us a story.
Him and Doc. It’s funny how their names are linked together now, because of what happened later — how a crime can tether you to the exact person you want to get the farthest away from. Back then Baker was 17 and scary-smart in a way that made him feel invincible. (These days, in prison, he subscribes to the Mensa magazine and spends his afternoons working through a quantum mechanics textbook recommended to him by UCLA physics professor/Big Bang Theory science consultant David Saltzberg.)

So one day, Baker wants to buy a pack of cigarettes. His girlfriend says she knows this older guy, Doc — he’s weird, but he’ll buy you whatever you want. He’s a medical student and always has lots of pills, too. His mission in life, he likes to say, is corrupting the youth of America. Doc’s apartment is in the same low-rent complex where his girlfriend lives with her brother, and she’ll go over there to hang out sometimes, when she doesn’t feel like being at home. Doc even gave her a key.

So the two of them let themselves into Doc’s apartment. It’s a hoarder’s paradise, full of random clutter — plastic models of skulls and scuba gear and Native American dolls. One lone poster on the wall: “My Own Private Idaho.” A narrow path through the boxes of junk to the TV and a single La-Z-Boy recliner. After a little while, Baker and his girlfriend get used to the smell.
What was your process for eliciting these details?
I was lucky in that Baker describes his memories in specific, sensory details. Most of these details are from him – though a few, like the “My Own Private Idaho” poster, are from police reports or the other people who hung out with Doc back then.
When Doc finally shows up, Baker is surprised: He’s older than a medical student should be, in his early 40s, and looks like a slightly more overweight version of Mr. Bean. He’s also one of those people who strikes you right off the bat as strange. In 2015 parlance, he’s probably “on the spectrum.” Smart-weird. The kind of guy who has a piece of the Arctic tundra in his freezer, and excitedly takes it out to show you. Baker’s girlfriend gets a kick out of him.
Your writing in this piece often sounds conversational, in a good way. Did you try to tell it like you were talking to a friend in a bar? Did you read it out loud?
I definitely didn’t read it out loud – I think I would drive myself crazy! The conversational voice was there from the very beginning, maybe because Baker and I had a very chatty email correspondence going for over a year by the time I was writing this.

This all happened a long time ago, at a time when Baker was smoking a lot of weed. All the strange interactions he had with Doc over the years have blurred together. At a certain point, things began to feel inevitable, all Baker’s small choices gaining momentum until it felt as though there were no more choices to make. And while he insists that he has no regrets about what took place later — it happened the way it should have, the way it had to — maybe if he’d made a different decision that afternoon, he wouldn’t be in prison right now. Because it can all be traced back to that very first time they met, when Doc turned to him and asked, straight-faced, as if it was the most normal thing in the world: “Have you ever thought about killing someone?”

***

When he first met Doc, Mike Baker was already, at age 16, something of expert in the messy, gray areas of life. Mike’s dad was a Korean War vet and an accomplished pilot, the kind of guy who was invited to give lectures on Air Force bases. He has a small airport named after him in Nebraska.

When Mike was 6, his parents split up and he moved with his mom to San Antonio. John Baker wasn’t much for talking on the phone, but he sent his son books — mostly spy thrillers — which Mike devoured. John would sometimes make elliptical allusions to a period in his life when he was involved in, shall we say, classified operations, and Mike was smart enough to fill in the blanks himself: CIA, obviously.

And so the novels his dad sent, with their twisty tales of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, were like missives from his father’s secret life, a world of good bad guys and bad good guys, with an unspoken code of behavior that had little to do with what was, strictly speaking, “legal.” The good guys needed the bad guys, and vice versa. They were players in the same game.
Why did you think this part of his backstory was relevant?
Baker referenced his dad so many times during our correspondence that it seemed clear to me that their relationship was a big factor in how Baker saw the world. He also described his exploits in terms of books and movies a few times. Both factors – the mythology he built up around his father and his fondness for theatrical crime/spy stories – seemed important in shaping how he saw himself, and maybe in why he made some of the choices he did.

Along with the books, Mike’s dad also sent tuition money for the private Christian schools that Mike’s mom couldn’t afford. Mike and his friend Travis were always the kids with Payless shoes in a sea full of Air Jordans. At school, they scrapped with the rich kids; on the weekends, they escaped to Travis’s family’s ranch in the country where they shot guns, set things on fire, and played games like what if you were running from the cops and had to survive on only your wits. Over the summer, Mike’s dad would visit, scold Mike for his uncut nails, and then buy him Umbros, or whatever else the branded object of desire of the moment was.

So Mike grew up with both an inclination toward mischief and a deference to protocol. It was like: Be bad, but be bad skillfully.
You use italics quite a bit in this story. Is that common for you? What do you think they’re useful for?
It functions differently in different places. Sometimes it’s to approximate a quote when someone told me more or less what they said, but not the exact words. Sometimes (as in here), it contributes to that conversational tone you were pointing out.
He grew into the kind of teenager who listened to Metallica but tucked in his shirt. When he got pulled over, he was always polite. He liked cops — the smart ones, at least. “I got arrested quite a few times,” he told me, mostly for drugs later on. “I never minded. The cops and I had a good time.”
This section and the one above don’t have a lot of quotes. How did you decide which ones to include?
That’s a good question. Partly it was for statements that Baker made that I couldn’t confirm with anyone else – I wanted to make it clear that the info was coming from him, that it was his version of what happened.

Mike and Travis got — well, not exactly kicked out, but not invited to return to a couple of schools. When Mike was 16, he went to public school for the first time. Tom C. Clark High School was one of the biggest schools in San Antonio; there were a thousand in his grade alone. Kids at Clark dyed their hair blue, they did drugs — they sold drugs. At this point Mike hadn’t even smoked weed. Luckily, though, he was a fast learner. These days, from prison, Mike remembers those years as a kind of glorious, unsupervised utopia: computers and cars and drugs and girls, the world opening up before him, dazzling in its possibilities for trouble and fun. Soon he was getting high every day and basically failing out of school. It was the best time of his life, like something big was about to begin.
Did he put it this way, or were you taking poetic license?
He said it was the best time of his life; he also talked about this period of his life so often, so rhapsodically, that I felt justified in describing it this way.

***

Pretty soon a whole crew of them is hanging out at Doc’s once or twice a week: Travis and his little brother; blue-haired Rodney and his girlfriend; Dan*; and, of course, Baker. (Baker’s girlfriend got too troublesome for her brother and was shipped off to her sister in Arizona.) An adult-free zone is a precious thing when you’re 17 — and despite being in his 40s, Doc often seems like a teenager in an adult’s body, impulsive and uncensored and not great at taking care of himself. He’s been in AA for over a decade, but he’ll do everything else: LSD, nitrous, coke, mushrooms, weed, Ambien. He buys the teens Boone’s Farm wine and whip-its, shows them disgusting pictures in his med school textbooks. When Travis mentions he might want to be a dentist, Doc puts him in a white lab coat and sneaks him into the cadaver lab, where they take an up-close look at teeth and jaws.

Sometimes they’ll all get high and put in one of those Faces of Death VHS tapes, watching car accidents and failed surgeries and assassinations, all the creative ways a human body can be ruined. During the day, at school, in that alternate universe of lockers and homework and pep rallies, they talk about him — their odd friend. “Baker and I thought Doc was really strange,” Rodney told investigators later. “We basically talked about his weirdness.”

Doc doesn’t reveal a whole lot about his past, but over time Baker and his friends get a sense of the rough outlines. He grew up in Idaho, where his parents were artists and professors, kind and nature-loving people, beloved by their neighbors. Doc took a different tack, studying physics, eventually making good money as a geophysicist for an oil company. For a while, his life seemed set: He had friends his own age, went camping, traveled to Hawaii and Peru. Then the Gulf War happened, the oil market contracted, and Doc got laid off. He decided to become a doctor — more for the money, prestige, and job security than for any longstanding love of medicine. While taking chemistry prerequisites at the University of Texas in Austin, he started going to raves with his undergrad classmates. On the phone with his sister, he called them his “little friends.”
Did you talk to her?
No, we weren’t able to find her. This is from a transcribed conversation she had with police during the original investigation in 2000.

And evidently, Baker and his high school friends are becoming Doc’s newer, littler friends. It’s a funny kind of relationship — everyone is using everyone else. The kids get the drugs and alcohol; Doc gets the audience and companionship he seems to crave. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t friends, after a fashion. Doc will drive halfway across town to give Baker a ride when he’s stranded somewhere. He tutors Travis in calculus for free. “He was cool,” Travis told me. “It was good to have a conversation with someone who was actually smart, not like uhhhhh guns are cool where’s the weed.”

There’s another reason Doc likes having a bunch of high school boys hang out at his apartment. Spending time with Doc requires a certain tolerance for hearing him talk about his fantasies — S&M ropes-and-domination stuff, mostly. A recurring fantasy involves Doc being choked from behind by a muscly alpha-male type. Once, early on, Doc puts his hand on Travis’s thigh. An obvious invitation. Travis plucks the hand off, Nope, and Doc doesn’t try again — except for this one other time when Travis tells a story about a wrestling match he’s just won, all the grappling and sweat, and Doc is like, you have to let me — and Travis again has to be like, dude, NO.
Why don’t you use quotes/dialogue here?
It’s such a distant memory that trying to reconstruct exactly what Doc said seemed like too big a leap. Instead, this is an attempt at approximating the way Travis told me the story nearly 20 years after the fact.

Sometimes Doc will also go to a very dark place. He has a thing about wanting to die, and wanting his death to become a snuff film. Some of the other kids who hear that are out the door and refuse to come back. It’s creepy. But the rest of them develop an attitude that’s basically like: Whatever, it’s just Doc. It’s not exactly normal — nothing about Doc is normal — but it becomes part of the background noise, the price of entry for spending time at Doc’s. Like that faint persistent stink. It’s amazing what you can get used to after a while.
How did you try to verify the facts about Doc’s background?
We tried to be really careful – I cross-checked everything that Baker said with the three of his friends I also interviewed (a few didn’t want to be quoted but spoke on background), and/or found corroboration in the very thorough investigation file. If there was something I couldn’t get someone else to confirm, I tried to make it clear that it came from only Mike (or only Travis, or whatever.
)

***

Here’s how I remember 1999: Britney Spears, millennium panic, everyone playing that Prince song on repeat as if it was going to expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Why did you lead this section with this first-person memory?
It’s funny, I can’t entirely explain why, but from the earliest draft this is how this section started –for some reason, it felt right. Perhaps because, as you note below, I was trying to remember (and encourage the reader to remember) that these were high-school kids and, for me at least, basically my age. And also it’s a way of grounding the reader in time in a way that’s slightly more interesting than the typical “On a [weather] [day of the week] in [month, year].”
For Doc, 1999 was the year of things getting worse. He was in his early 40s, overweight, balding, and in debt. He spent a lot of his time with high school students who made fun of him. He had a spiel that he’d slip into when he got high: I’m all used up, I’m a hag, my life is worthless. The guys were sometimes like, No, man, you’ve got so much to live for but then sometimes they’re like, Whatever, shut up, Doc.
Were you trying to use your language to drive home that these were high-school kids?
Probably in an unconscious way. I think I was trying to capture the hubris of adolescence – how, when you’re 16, crazy things happen and you’re just not wise enough to look at them and say: hold on, wait, this is insane.

In Doc’s third year of medical school, he develops a bad habit of asking patients questions that the attendings deem inappropriate. He takes it hard when he fails his psychiatry rotation — it’s a blow to his confidence, and also to his finances. He has been living off his med school loans, occasionally borrowing money from his parents so his electricity doesn’t get cut off. Plus, there’s the tension of leading what amounts to a double life: No one from his family or med school knows about his after-hours life — the teens and the drugs and the dark sexual fantasies. Only a handful of friends even know that he’s gay. When he talks to his parents on the phone, it’s all Yes, school is tough, but it’s going well, even though by September 1999 he’s stopped showing up to class entirely.

As Doc feels his life spinning out of control, he gets increasingly fixated on the snuff film–suicide idea. He asks Baker and Travis and Rodney: Would you? For money? The guys all say a variation of: No, of course not, no, I will not kill you for money, fuck no. But Doc has an engineer’s mind, and is skilled at thinking his way through problems. What if he could find someone to do it for free? He puts an ad in San Antonio’s underground gay newspaper, using carefully coded language — occult, autoerotic asphyxiation. When Baker comes over, Doc gives him the latest update: This guy is going to fly in from California to do it; no, that fell through. But this guy who works at Kinko’s is going to do it; no, that didn’t work out, either. It must have been frustrating. All those other problems, and then not even this going in his favor. His death is the last thing he’ll ever have; of course he wants to get it right.

***

Incidentally: Autassassinophilia, or the sexual fetish of wanting to be killed, is quite rare. There was that German cannibal, who posted an internet ad “looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed” — and actually found one, and also a famous case of consensual homicide in Maryland (that one also started with an internet ad). Last fall I called up Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, to ask him about it. “Auto what?” he said. “Actually, your predecessor, John Money, coined the term — ” I started to explain. “Well,” Dr. Berlin said, “he coined a whole lot of terms.”
This is funny, in a pretty disturbing section. Were you trying to get some humor in there?
Yes, for sure. Humor and horror may seem so different in some ways, but they really are adjacent emotional states, I think.

Being turned on by your own death is a fetish that causes both moral and legal problems.
Was it clear that Doc’s wanting to be killed was a sexual fetish? Not just a form of suicide?
Well, he certainly seemed to talk about it in sexual terms. But I don’t think anything about this situation was clear.
People who are into the more torture-y kinds of S&M can make the case that they’re consenting — indeed, inviting — their own abuse. But can you consent to your own death? Kind of — attempting suicide may be religiously proscribed, but it isn’t illegal. But assisted suicide is a trickier question, even when it’s done for socially sanctioned reasons, such as cases of terminal illness. A handful of states have legalized physician-assisted suicide; others classify it as first-degree murder. Add sexual compulsion to the mix and the waters get so muddied it’s hard to see anything clearly.

Autassassinophilia, as defined by Dr. Money, is a reciprocal fetish — it’s not just the victim who’s deriving pleasure from the experience, but the attacker as well. Then it’s no longer a case of humanitarian intervention, but something selfish and sick — even if the outcome (a person who wants to die is dead) is the same. Courts have a hard time knowing what to do with such circumstances. The German cannibal was at first convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8.5 years; in a 2006 re-trial, the charge was upped to murder, and he was re-sentenced to life in prison. Robert Glass, the man who killed the Maryland woman, died in prison near the end of his two-year sentence for manslaughter. Both men expressed remorse; the German cannibal is now a vegetarian.
Also darkly funny. Where did this detail come from?
From a news article I read about the case.

Baker: [Doc] started getting a little more edgy-pushy about the killing issue. Several times he called to say “Goodbye,” a couple of times he stopped by my mother’s house and dropped off crap (I say crap, because that’s all it was [i.e., Bible covers, feather boas, books (awful books), and misc. junk, all in the same box, too]).

Travis: The last time I saw him, before he disappeared, he was like, “Yeah, I found somebody else to do it.” I was like, “Oh, okay, whatever, it sucks that you’re gonna go.” He was a med student, man. He had stuff to offer the world. He was only 38 or whatever. [Actually, he was 43.] So I was like, that sucks. But okay. Then after a while I didn’t hear from him.
Why did you bring in their unfiltered voices here instead of weaving it into your own description? Also, was it intentional to not identify the source? I’m assuming interviews, but seeing italics makes me wonder if it’s from a court transcript, a letter, etc.
Baker’s is actually from the confession he wrote out for investigators back in 2003. Travis’ is a quote from my conversation with him. Looking back at this piece now, I can see myself taking a step back as we get closer to the actual murder. I didn’t know exactly what happened that day, and I also didn’t feel as though I could truly understand what was going on in their heads at the time; having them tell it in their words seemed right somehow. I didn’t think my presence was necessary here.

***

And so it happened that one day, not long after the non-event that was Y2K, Baker and Doc drove west from San Antonio, leaving after midnight, arriving at Big Bend National Park at dawn. Doc drove Baker’s car; Baker curled up in the backseat, trying to sleep. The rising sun illuminated the rough face of the desert, the long spine of the Chisos Mountains in the distance, and beyond that, Mexico. The desert air was clean and clear in January, no humidity at all, everything sharp-edged in the morning light, looking exactly like what it was.
The descriptions in the previous two sentences are beautiful. How do you think your background in fiction and poetry bleeds into the way you write?
Probably! For a long time I thought I couldn’t be a journalist because I like doing these indulgent lyrical riffs too much. It also helps that I spend a lot of time in this part of the country, so the descriptions feel right at hand — I don’t have to force them/reach too hard for them.

Doc had some pretty clear ideas about where and how he wanted to die. The area around Austin and San Antonio didn’t strike him as an appropriate setting — it was just flat, characterless fields; sprawl, strip malls, and cows. But the Big Bend region had a rugged drama that reminded him of his childhood in the mountains of Idaho.

He was also firmly fixed on a method of death. There’s no polite way of putting it: Doc had decided that he wanted to be filmed as he was staked down and cut open. His very own Face of Death, caught on camera. This was a crucial but problematic part of the fantasy. It tended to turn prospective killers off. Doc was worried that once they were out in the middle of the desert, Baker would just shoot him dead — or, worse, drive away and leave him to wander the desert until he succumbed to a slow, unwitnessed death by starvation. But Doc had thought this through, too. He put a thousand dollars in his apartment mailbox. He filed the head of his little mailbox key so it was as small as possible. Then he encased it in some plastic tubing and swallowed it. In order to get the money, Baker would have to get the key. And in order to get the key, he’d have to cut Doc open.

Baker saw all this — Doc filing the key; Doc loading the shovel and pickax into the trunk of the car — but still, somehow, the idea that he would actually kill Doc seemed impossible. Even as they got in the car and headed west, he was still thinking about the whole experience like a rehearsal for a play that would never actually be staged.
I feel like we made a leap here. I don’t have a sense why Baker agreed. And I didn’t know he was doing it for money. Talk about that. Was it deliberate?
There are a few competing accounts. The investigators seemed to think Baker did it purely for the money – that’s maybe the easiest/cleanest explanation. Back then, Baker told investigators that he did it because Doc had been harassing him and he didn’t know what else to do. Now, 15+ years later, he says he did it because Doc was a pervert and deserved to die. But he also told me that there was a part of him that never actually thought it would happen, that they weren’t actually going to go through with it. So, I’m not sure there is a clear explanation—that might account for the sense of a leap. One more mystery.

There was no one at the park’s entrance gate. Doc signed in anyway, identifying himself as “sol. hiker” and his destination as “Dagger Mountain.” They drove 20 miles into the park, until they reached Old Ore Road, a rarely traveled unpaved road that heads out to one of the park’s least-explored corners.

After a few miles, Doc pulled over, and the two men walked even farther into the desert, over ground that was too rough for the car. Baker thought that it looked like an ugly, lonely place to die. “I see pictures of Big Bend in Texas Monthly and it’s green, there are flowers. But I don’t remember seeing anything green anywhere in that park,” he told me later. “Just yucca or something poking the shit out of me over and over again.”

Baker followed Doc through the desert until they reached the place Doc was looking for. It was clear that he’d been here before; the grave was already marked out and half-dug. A handful of tent stakes had been driven to the side of the small sloping hill. Baker sat there, smoking weed to dampen his hangover and rising panic, as Doc dug the grave deeper.

Here’s the thing: Baker loved shooting guns, but had gone deer hunting only once in his life. He’d been fine with killing the deer; it was the part that came after — dressing the carcass — that undid him. There was no way he was going to have anything to do with the intestines of a human being.

Baker’s memory of what happened next is not exactly clear. At some point, he says he told Doc the disemboweling was a no-go. They started arguing about it — Doc standing in his fresh-dug grave, sweaty and pissed off; Baker feeling queasy and annoyed, sick of the whole scene on a few different levels.

Baker: There was a pickax sitting there and I distinctly remember looking at the pickax and instantly turning away. Because I’d have to pull it back out… Then I grabbed the shovel and hit him in the head with it as hard as I could. I remember expecting him to drop like they do in the movies. I hit him twice. Right on top of his head, as hard as I could. It was like — nothing. He was bleeding profusely. But it didn’t phase him. That fucked me up. You see all these goddamn movies — you hit someone with a broomstick and they fall over. I put everything I had into hitting him with that shovel. And — nothing.
Why did you include his words here verbatim? Because there was no way to paraphrase them, or because it’s just so disturbing?
Partially because it’s disturbing; partially because I didn’t want to have to authorially intrude to either validate or disclaim Baker’s account. This is what he says happened, and that’s really all we can know.

Defeated, the two men walked back to the car. It was 450 miles to San Antonio; this time, Baker drove. Next to him, Doc sat quietly, brooding and dripping blood on the passenger seat. The drive back seemed endless to Baker, all that West Texas scrubland stretching on for miles, with nothing to rest your eye on. Baker stopped for lunch at Subway, but when Doc staggered in — woozy, dirt-stained, blood crusting on his head wound — Baker noticed the other customers start to stare. He hustled Doc back into the car and kept driving. When they made it back to San Antonio, Doc seemed depressed. “I really hadn’t planned on coming back to town,” he told Baker. Now he had to start the whole process over again.

***

On April 5, the El Paso Times ran a small story with the headline “Half-buried Body at Big Bend Baffles Police.”
Why did you switch away from Baker’s perspective here and not go directly into the second (successful) murder attempt?
Structurally speaking, it serves as a cliffhanger. We know that Doc ends up dead, and that Baker probably had something to do with it. The reader probably thought Doc was going to die at the end of the previous section, but he didn’t. So the question remains — what exactly happened? I wanted to delay the reveal as long as possible. And also, this structure mimics the investigators’ discovery of what happened.

Before long, investigators had determined that the body belonged to a San Antonio medical student named Shannon Roberts. Roberts’ father had reported him missing in early March, shortly after he’d paid two months of rent in advance. When investigators started interviewing Roberts’ friends, they learned that he’d been talking about wanting to be killed for a long time; he’d mentioned it to a friend in Oregon as many as 15 years ago. In recent months, his death fantasies had become more urgent and real-seeming. Roberts’ history seemed to point toward suicide.

The investigation easily could’ve gone nowhere. There were no witnesses, no useful DNA, no way to determine cause of death, precious little physical evidence. But there was one thing working in the investigators’ favor: Because the crime took place in a national park, federal authorities had jurisdiction. That meant the FBI, with all its money and resources, took charge of the case. FBI agent Steve French partnered with Cary Brown, the friendly, dogged park ranger. They were joined by Texas Ranger Dave Duncan — a quiet, analytical man who proved useful to have around. “The FBI is not well thought of in some of the local jurisdictions,” Brown told me. “Some of these sheriffs’ departments, if I walk in the door, all they’ll tell me is where the men’s room is. But when you’re a Texas Ranger, doors open. Dave was our door-opener.”
What parts of the story came from law enforcement records? Was a lot of detailed information public?
The case file was provided to me by Big Bend National Park, after I filed a FOIA request. It was incredibly detailed. The investigators had to piece together a lot of information about Doc’s life in order to figure out what happened. Because of the peculiar circumstances of Doc’s death, the detectives had to delve pretty deep into who he was, what made him tick — that was a big help. It was definitely much more detailed than other police files I’ve looked at: They interviewed his friends, family and co-workers. Once they narrowed in on Baker, they interviewed many of his friends, too. There was also a copy of a journal that Doc’s mother kept during the course of the investigation. That was pretty heartbreaking to read.

As investigators continued to interview Roberts’ former co-workers and med school classmates, one nickname kept coming up over and over again: Sweet Thing. From what they could piece together, Sweet Thing was Roberts’ boyfriend. Roberts was clearly obsessed with the young man and talked about him all the time, but the relationship had to stay secret — Sweet Thing had a girlfriend and didn’t want anyone to know he was involved with Roberts, too. For the investigators, he quickly became both Roberts’ probable boyfriend and the chief suspect in the murder: a local kid named Mike Baker.

Back in Idaho, Roberts’ mother kept careful notes in neat, forward-slanting cursive, trying to piece together what had happened to her eccentric, brilliant, troubled son. After the autopsy, she planned to scatter his ashes in a meadow on top of a mountain, the same place where his grandparents’ ashes were scattered. The last time Doc had visited Idaho, in 1997, he and his father had hiked up to the meadow and found the bear grass all in bloom. There was no official service. Doc’s parents told their friends that their son had fallen while hiking.

***

The investigators’ first interview with Baker took place at his mother’s house. Cary Brown recalls Baker as charming, nonchalant, and intelligent. For the most part, the interview was routine. Baker admitted that Roberts, who he called Doc, was “a friend,” but said that he hadn’t seen him in a while. He denied having a sexual relationship with him, and the investigators decided to drop that bit for now. When Brown asked Baker if he’d ever been to Big Bend before, the young man said that he’d gone once or twice when he was a kid, on a family trip. “No, we’ve never been there,” his mother corrected him. Baker gave her a funny look. It was the smallest thing, but Brown remembers flagging it in his mind: There’s something this kid isn’t telling us.

A scrap of evidence would later confirm Brown’s suspicions: After the presumed date of Doc’s death, his debit card had been used to buy concert tickets and a room at the New Orleans Hilton during Mardi Gras. That hotel room had been occupied by Mike Baker and two friends. If nothing else, the investigators now had Baker on debit card fraud. But at this point, the case against Baker was just speculation. No physical evidence tied the young man to the scene.

To Baker, after the initial flurry of interviews in the spring of 2000, it seemed as though the case had gone away. In the intervening years, his life straightened out somewhat. He got more serious with his girlfriend. They moved in together, bought a purebred husky named Jinx. He got a good computer job and began taking classes at Southwest Texas University in San Marcos. He was still both using and selling drugs, but he was less reckless, he says, more businesslike about it.

Then, in 2002, more than two years after Doc’s death, Baker was in his dorm room in San Marcos, rolling a joint and talking on the phone to his father when there was a knock on the door. “Who is it?” he shouted. “FBI,” a voice said, loud enough that Baker’s dad could hear. “I’ll call you back later,” Baker’s dad said, and hung up. When Baker opened the door, he saw the men who had questioned him two years before. They wanted to talk again.
Was it hard to get Baker’s parents to talk to you? How did you approach those interviews?
His dad is dead; his mom finally agreed to meet with me. We talked for a while, but none of it was on the record.

The trio of investigators — park ranger Brown; FBI agent French; and Texas Ranger Duncan — knew by now that no useful DNA evidence had been found at the scene. The only way they’d be able to determine what happened to Doc was if Baker told them. “He’s a smart guy, he was real tuned in. You kind of felt like you had to talk to him as a peer,” Brown told me later. “It felt like a real game with him — who was going to outsmart who.”

The interview started just before noon at the station. The four men sat in the bare, windowless interrogation room. The investigators told Baker they knew about Doc’s problems — his huge loans, his struggles in med school, his despair about aging, and his longstanding interest in suicide. All they wanted, they said, was for Baker to tell them what happened, so they could wrap up the case and provide closure to Doc’s family.

This time, Baker was more forthcoming. He said that he knew that Doc was obsessed with committing suicide, but denied that he’d been involved in any way. He again denied having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with Doc. If anything, he said, he’d found Doc both embarrassing and annoying, and he’d been trying to distance himself from him. But Doc was impossible to ignore — when Baker didn’t answer his pages, he’d start calling Baker’s mom, asking where he was.

Duncan told Baker that he had evidence that proved that Baker knew more about Doc’s death than he was letting on, something that could possibly result in felony charges. Duncan wrote the mystery charges on a piece of notebook paper and placed it facedown on the table. Baker eyed the paper. “That little note Dave turned upside down on the table, that was the key to it,” Brown said.

The investigators told Baker that they’d recommend that prosecutors drop the additional charge — the mysterious thing written on the piece of paper, still facedown on the table — if he’d cooperate in helping them close the case of Doc’s death. Still wary, Baker asked why he hadn’t been read his rights; Brown told him that he hadn’t been arrested, and he was free to go at any time. “It would be stupid for me to leave,” Baker said.

At this point, the four men had been in the cramped room for a couple of hours. They took a break; Duncan brought Baker a Coke.
What sources did you use to reconstruct this scene?
It’s all in the report the investigators prepared after the interrogation – the Coke, the “jumping into cold water” quote, everything.
When the questioning resumed, Baker started talking. Admitting what really happened, he said, was “like jumping into cold water.” And then he described that first trip to the park — the swallowed key; the grave; the shovel; how he’d tried, but failed, to bash Doc’s head in. When they made it back to San Antonio, he said, Doc had given him $1,000 for the lame attempt. And that was all he knew about the death of Shannon Roberts.

The story was shocking, but something was off; the room didn’t have the feeling of a person who had just confessed. Baker seemed “disturbed and thoughtful,” Duncan wrote in his report later. There’s more that you’re not telling us, Duncan said. Baker’s mind was still on that piece of notebook paper: It’s about the debit card, he ventured. Duncan congratulated him and flipped the paper over: DEBIT CARD ABUSE, it read. The card fraud was a possible felony charge, investigators told Baker, but assisted suicide was a Class C misdemeanor in Texas. (Strictly speaking, this is true — but only if the assist doesn’t result in serious injury or death. If it does, then it’s a felony.) They told Baker they’d recommend that the DA drop the felony fraud charges if he came clean about what had really happened between him and Doc.
Baker’s a smart guy. Was he really convinced that a debit card fraud charge was worse than murder? Or do you think he, consciously or not, wanted to come clean?
Who knows? I hesitate to speculate what his motivations were.

That’s when Baker set back in his chair and told them all about the second trip to Big Bend.

***

In the days after the two men returned from the shovel incident, Baker said, Doc kept “giving [him] shit” about the botched murder. He also promised Baker more money — $4,000 — if he’d try again get the job right this time.

In early February, Doc and Baker made the 450-mile drive from San Antonio to Big Bend for the second time. Again, they hiked out to the gravesite. Doc got in the hole and began digging; by this point, it was deep enough that it reached up to his chest. Again, Baker told Doc he wasn’t going to disembowel him. “He started getting irritated,” Baker later wrote in his confession. “From the hole, he started grabbing at me with the pickax he had. I honestly don’t remember everything that took place but eventually I ended up with some rope that he had bought to be tied down with and choked him with it. After that I started filling in the hole.” Doc hadn’t liked the idea of being gnawed on by coyotes after his death; as a precaution, he’d bought chickenwire to keep his body protected.
What happened to filming it? Did he break his promise?
They dropped that idea pretty early on in the process. Baker was smart enough to know that filming a murder was not a good idea.
Baker partially covered Doc’s body with the wire, then placed the red blanket over him. Jets kept flying overhead, and he felt as though every one was surveilling him.
You did a great job of getting in his head. Did you have to go over this scene many times with him? Did you ask him directly what he was seeing and hearing, or did this detail come up naturally?
We spent a lot of time talking around the murder – what happened right before, what happened right after. I think we were both nervous about talking about the actual event.

Driving out of the park, Baker felt both panic and relief. He had an early MP3 player that held only a handful of songs, and he remembers listening to two over and over again: Faith Hill’s “Breathe” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Back in San Antonio, he went to Doc’s apartment to retrieve his payment from the mailbox using a spare key. It turned out to be less than $2,000. “[I] figured that would be the end of it,” Baker wrote in his confession.

***

In May 2003, Mike Baker was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Shannon Roberts. If Baker was lucky, his lawyer told him, he was looking at life in prison.

While all that was being worked out, Baker was housed in the Reeves County Jail in Pecos, a rough, hot West Texas town 400 miles from San Antonio. He spent his 10 weeks there planning his escape. While his jailbreak couldn’t exactly be called a success, even now Baker is still proud of the plan he came up with. “My dad got a kick out of it,” he says.
Did you put this in to point out how much Baker wants his dad’s approval? I noticed that his dad’s opinion also came up later around the murder itself: Baker felt his dad approved of his having “followed through with something I felt I had to do.”
Yes, it was definitely such a strong thread in our correspondence, so important to how he saw the world, that I wanted to weave that in somehow.
It took a few weeks to put together the elements: the mop closet that popped open if he kicked it in just the right place; the cheap, easily pickable lock that provided access to the crawl space above the ceiling; the rec periods he spent exploring the jail’s ventilation ducts; the street clothes he snagged from the jail’s property room during one of these ductwork excursions.

On August 12, Baker called his lawyer and asked if there was any chance his charge could be pled down to second-degree murder. According to Baker, the lawyer said the odds weren’t good. The next day, Baker put on street clothes under his jail uniform. When his unit was called for rec time, he headed for the mop closet. He shimmied out of his uniform and crawled through the ventilation shaft until he reached its end. The sudden shock of sunlight was disorienting; Baker hadn’t been outside in months. He jumped down onto the sidewalk and began walking toward the train depot, where he planned to hop on a train and head east. He knew from his friends in jail that he’d have to pass by the volunteer fire department, which he’d been assured was always empty; as luck would have it, though, this morning the firefighters were hosting a family barbecue, and the place was packed. Baker kept his head down and tried to walk as much like a free man as possible.

He had almost made it to the corner when he heard someone call his name. “The first thing I thought was, ‘Well, shit, I made it 100 feet,’” he told me later. He looked up to see one of his jailers walking toward him from the barbecue. “What the hell are you doing out here?” the man asked. Baker spun some story about his attorney getting him bail. “Well, good luck,” the jailer said, holding out his hand. Baker shook it. As soon as he turned the corner past the fire station, he sprinted toward the railroad tracks, sure he was minutes from being caught. (The jail didn’t notice his absence until 4 that afternoon.)

Baker set up camp in a small stand of mesquite bushes, sure that any minute now a posse would be after him. “I expected a movie-level response with dogs, choppers, SWAT teams, roadblocks,” he told me. It was a long August day, and the sun took forever to set. Once it was finally dark, Baker crept unnoticed onto a train. With a series of frightening mechanical clanks, the huge machine worked itself to life. Then they were off, “hauling ass across the pitch-black darkness of BFE Texas,” as Baker described it later.

At dawn, the train paused in a small town not far from Dallas. Baker hopped off and began walking toward a Dairy Queen he saw in the distance. His plans for this phase of the escape were hazy: He’d call his friends, the old gang from Doc’s place, who would come pick him up. Then — well, they’d figure something out. Still, it was hard not to feel demoralized. He was sunburned, windburned, and thoroughly freaked out. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since his escape the day before. He walked by a dead cow near the tracks — its guts had been devoured by buzzards and its skin tanned by the sun, leaving just a hollowed-out carcass, four feet pointing straight up in the air like a dead animal in a cartoon.
This is such a vivid image!
Baker described it in almost exactly these terms. He’s a very good writer himself, which made my job easier.
When he finally made it to the Dairy Queen, he told the cashier he’d been beat up and robbed. Whether she believed the story or not, she gave him a free Hungerbuster meal and a Heath Bar blizzard. He was so grateful he could’ve cried.

Baker began calling up his friends, asking them to come pick him up. The first guy he reached, Travis, said no way. The second said the same thing. The third didn’t answer. Baker holds this against them to this day. He’d pulled off this improbable escape, and now friends who he’d bailed out of trouble before were ditching him when he needed them most. But these friends had also been visited by Texas Rangers, who suspected Baker might get in touch. “It was so stupid,” Travis said. “He should’ve just gone to Mexico.”

Finally, Baker called his lawyer, who told him that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was offering a plea deal for second-degree murder, a charge with an average sentence of six to 10 years, providing he turned himself in. Baker agreed to the deal. His escape had lasted fewer than 36 hours.
Did you ask Baker why he tried to escape, especially since he you mention later that he thought his punishment was fair?
At that point, he was convinced that he was going to be indicted for 1st degree murder, and so escaping seemed worth the risk, I think. Also, I wonder if his spy book habit played a role, too – once he realized it was possible to escape, it was probably hard for him to not try it.

While the courts sorted things out, Baker was temporarily put in the Callahan County jail, where he was housed next to a 91-year-old named Red Rountree, the nation’s oldest bank robber. Baker asked Rountree why he was still robbing banks at his advanced age. “There is no better feeling in this world than leaving a bank with their money,” Rountree said.
Why did you include this aside?
In one of our conversations Baker mentioned that he was in prison next to a 90-year-old bank robber, and I thought – no way, that’s too crazy to be true. But then I cross-checked it with some other sources and figured out that it must’ve been this guy, who I believe was the country’s oldest serial bank robber, and who was arrested outside Dallas at the same time Baker would’ve been locked up in jail there. So the crazy story turned out to be true. I just loved that detail so much, how it hints at the world of these men who break rules just because it’s fun to break rules.

***

Last year, I called Big Bend National Park to see about getting the file on the death of Shannon Roberts. I started to describe the case, but the guy at the ranger station interrupted me: “You mean the guy who strangled his boyfriend?” That’s the official interpretation of what happened between Doc and Baker. The case file repeatedly states that the two men were lovers. So does the only other lengthy account of the crime, a chapter in an anthology of deaths and other assorted tragedies in national parks called Death in Big Bend. There’s a dark, upsetting logic to this narrative; Doc’s death becomes a sex game taken too far, a classic example of autassassinophilia.

The investigators seemed to take the stories that Doc told his friends about Baker being his boyfriend at face value, even though their reports also note other fantastic tales he seemingly invented (such as being on the run from the Mexican Mafia and being a member of the Witness Protection Program). The particulars of Doc’s hidden life as a gay man seemed alien to them. In San Antonio, they enlisted an agent to dress up “flamboyantly” and “go undercover” in a gay bar to retrieve an alt magazine in which Doc had advertised his death fantasies.

The one investigator who would talk to me about the two men’s supposed relationship seemed like he’d rather not. Cary Brown spent three years investigating the case. When I pushed him on it, he told me that he disagreed with the case file and didn’t believe that Baker and Doc were lovers. “We never could confirm it,” Brown said. “Shannon told people that [Baker] was his lover, [Baker] always denied it. My gut feeling was that it was a fantasy of Shannon’s. He was infatuated with him, [Baker] had a girlfriend… my read on it was that it probably never happened.” Baker wrote in his confession that Doc made “sexual advances,” but he’s always denied reciprocating. The investigators didn’t know how they could confirm the story either way, and didn’t feel as though they needed to. “It was irrelevant to us in the pursuit of our investigation,” Brown said.
The story is structured as a bunch of relatively short sections. Was that the first structure you hit upon, or did you land there after trying other things? Are you a fan of short sections generally?
The original plan was to release the story serially. Even after we backed away from that, sections seemed to make sense – this story is made up of a few discrete moments, and I think the short sections help keep the momentum going.

***

When I first wrote to Mike Baker, in February 2014, I expected some sort of stock story: I was a sinner then but I have seen the error of my ways or my parents fucked me up or there has been a miscarriage of justice.
What did you say in your initial email to him?
First it was a letter, actually. I just introduced myself and said I was curious about his story. I also mentioned a guy I know in Marfa who happened to be friends with Baker in high school, as a way of trying to prove that I was legit, I guess.
Instead, in his emails he was surprisingly matter-of-fact about the whole situation. He’d had a fine childhood, the cops hadn’t railroaded him, his lawyer was adequate; he’d made mistakes and been caught fair and square. Most strikingly, he had no regrets about killing Doc. Those were his exact words: “I have no regrets.” I dropped the subject for a little while, and we corresponded about books and graffiti and bad prison food.
How soon into your correspondence did you ask him about the murder?
Right away – but when he told me there had been no grand injustice, I dropped the subject for a little bit.

Once Baker confessed, the investigators didn’t need to parse his motivations any further. But I couldn’t stop thinking about them. In December, after we’d been corresponding for nearly a year, I broached the subject of Doc’s death once more.
Do you always spend so long getting to know subjects for your stories?
I do think it’s important to take time to build rapport… but I can’t think of another situation where I’ve spent this long getting to know someone. I just got really obsessed with this story.
“The crime itself has never bothered me,” he replied. “[T]he only thing that stings a little is the damage I caused to my family and ‘friends’. I really could have done without spending over a decade in prison. I’ve missed the entire lifetime of the iPod, which REALLY pisses me off. In the next couple years, the stand alone iPod will be gone and I will have never gotten to hold a new one… Also, the death and re-birth of the Camero [sic], very upsetting.”

Baker has a dark sense of humor and a tendency to be brutally honest, which I appreciated. But this time, his words gave me a funny feeling. The worst thing about killing this guy, ostensibly your friend, was missing the iPod? I started a few responses, but kept closing the email window before I sent them. Finally, I decided to meet his blunt honesty with some of my own. I wrote Baker that his lack of remorse sometimes unnerved me. Ninety percent of the time, I didn’t think he was a psychopath, but then sometimes he’d say something that made me wonder.

His response came in three emails, because he kept running up against the 15-minute time limit for using the prison computer. My email “got [his] heart going,” he said. “It bothers me a little that you could view me as a nut. I think the reason it bothers me is because I see someone who is nuts as out of control (I know that isn’t a valid description) and the idea of being out of control runs contrary to everything I think that I am.”

He began to explain how Doc’s death was the result of logical decisions he’d made while he was totally in control of himself. “[Doc] had no business at all being free in society….I don’t have the ability to accurately convey how disturbed he was,” he wrote. “This wasn’t a depressed gay dude. This was a really fucked up individual.” He went on at length about how Doc was a child molester and a pervert, an “absolute dirt bag” who destroyed people’s lives. (There’s no evidence whatsoever that Doc molested children.) Baker couldn’t walk away from the situation because Doc wouldn’t let him; he didn’t call the police because he was doing too many other illegal things at the time — and plus, people in action movies never called the cops.

“Did I want to kill him? No, of course not. Was it easy to talk myself into it? No. However, once it was done, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Do I view myself as psycho/socio-pathic? No, and I have taken the psych courses to know the signs. I think what I did was make a very deliberate, almost logical decision. I made that choice and to this day, I am still content with it.”

His dad, the ultimate authority, approved of what he’d done — “Maybe not the execution of that decision, but at least with the fact that I made the choice and followed through with something I felt I had to do,” he wrote.

There’s an uncomfortable tension running throughout these emails. I think it’s because Baker and I have different stories in our heads. In Baker’s, he’s calculating and deliberate, like the bad guy in an airport thriller. I wanted to believe — I still want to believe — that Baker was caught up in something huge and overwhelming, that whatever was going on between him and Doc — whether it was sex or drugs or money or stalking or some dire combination of all those factors — left him feeling trapped and confused and out of control, and that killing Doc truly seemed to him like the only way out. That’s how I can feel sorry for him, instead of scared of him.
How did Baker react when he read your piece?
He seemed slightly weirded out, mostly approving. His two major critiques were that I said he was studying quantum mechanics, but he was actually studying special relativity; and also that Doc had never given him money. We still correspond, just not as frequently.

Baker’s friends and family told me some things that aligned with my preferred version: How in the month or so before Doc’s death, Baker was in a precarious place. How his mom had kicked him out of her house because he didn’t have a job. How he was crashing on friends’ couches, jobless, aimless, doing too many drugs. (Baker, predictably, refuses this characterization: “I always had a job when I needed one,” he told me.) In any case, he remembers this as one of his “vampire periods,” when he’d stay up all night and sleep while the sun was up. A family member who saw him around this time was troubled by how unkempt he looked — an ominous sign in a guy who was usually so meticulous about his appearance that his friends had to remind him to untuck his shirt when he went to go talk to a girl.

Meanwhile, Doc’s fixation on Baker intensified. He paged Baker frequently, and showed up at his mom’s house if he didn’t answer. Baker had been very careful about not introducing Doc to his current girlfriend — he didn’t want her mixed up with that side of his life. But when his girlfriend graduated from high school, Baker says he saw Doc in the audience, watching. “There was some stalking behavior,” Cary Brown told me. “But I’m not sure it wasn’t mutually beneficial.” Baker took drugs from Doc; he sometimes borrowed Doc’s car for days. According to Travis, a few times Baker was in possession of an unexpected wad of cash. When Travis asked him where he got it, Baker would shrug and say that Doc gave it to him.

None of Baker’s friends from those days are still in touch with him. “How can I associate with someone who did that?” his high school classmate Ross told me. Still, the handful that I talked to defended their old friend, after a fashion. “Doc was sick. I think he preyed on Baker,” his friend Rodney told me via text message. (He declined a phone interview.) “I think [Baker] was just a confused kid that was desperate and got caught up in something,” Ross said. “He was this quiet, shy, very smart kid who kept to himself and all of a sudden he was on this path. Who could he talk to? I think he was just a kid that got too far in and couldn’t get out.”
It sounds like you developed a pretty friendly communication with Baker. Is it fair to say you liked him? Did you struggle with portraying his positive qualities while not dismissing what he’d done?
Yes, definitely. I enjoy him as a person — he’s funny and very intelligent. But there are aspects of his personality, and of his history, that certainly give me pause. I guess it’s that tension that was so compelling to me — trying to hold both Bakers in my head at the same time.

***

On a warm, false-spring day in January, I finally got a chance to visit Baker face-to-face at the low-security prison where he’s serving out the final years of his sentence.
Nearly a year passed between your first email to Baker and meeting him face-to-face. Why did you meet him in person so late in the process?
Well, it took forever to get permission from the warden. I think I was also nervous about meeting him in person.
He was tall and tattooed and handsome, in a mechanic on a soap opera kind of way. Throughout our conversation, which included a discussion of Infinite Jest and the prison cats of Leavenworth, Baker was unhurried and thoughtful. He recounted stories from his past with a vividness that made me wonder whether he had a photographic memory. As he spoke, he seemed to be gazing into an interior distance, eyes moving back and forth, giving the impression of a computer moving at high speed. Afterward, he wrote me an email apologizing for not making eye contact; he’s gotten out of the habit, he said: “I don’t think that helps too much with my reputation as an asshole.”
How were you feeling before your visit? Was Baker what you expected in person?
I remember being really nervous that he would have swastika tattoos. And he might, but if so they were covered up by his prison uniform.

Midway though our seven-hour conversation, I asked Baker about the murder.
Wow, seven hours! Did you share a lot about yourself? Do you think that spending that much time with him was necessary to get him to open up?
In retrospect, it does seem like a long time! And a few weeks later I accidentally lost the tape recorder with the interview while swimming (long story) and so except for the parts that I transcribed (which was not all of it), I don’t have a record of what we talked about. He doesn’t get many visitors and seemed happy to be talking to someone. He really likes telling stories about his wild youth, and they usually are pretty entertaining stories. And I was so obsessed with the case that I really wanted him to walk through every part of it for me, step by step.
The memory of that day felt surreal, he said. As he told the story, he slipped in and out of the present tense, vague on some points but recalling others with a hallucinatory intensity. He kept coming back to the grave Doc had dug for himself, how long it took to dig it, how deep and wide and big it had been. I’d been listening Baker’s story for so long that his decisions were starting to make a kind of sense to me. I found myself in the strange position of nodding along to an account that I knew ended with a man being killed.

“I remember the last time he was down in that hole, digging,” he told me, “thinking it would be so easy just to get this over with. Because I really didn’t want him back in my car.” And so he grabbed the rope and tossed it around Doc’s neck. Doc tried to clamber out of the hole, but couldn’t — it was too deep. He swung the pickax at Baker, who dodged it easily. Finally, he stopped struggling. There’s a pause here on the tape, full with the background sounds of the prison visiting room, the clank-thump of candy bars dropping down from vending machines. “So he didn’t want to die,” I asked eventually. Baker let out an odd, strangled half-laugh. “It sure didn’t seem like it,” he said.
Oh my God, everything about this graf! The sounds of the vending machine, the realization that he didn’t really want to be killed. Was this graf hard to write, or did your emotion help you write it? And what did you feel at that moment?
To be honest, I don’t remember what I felt right then – but when I listened back to the recording, things got very quiet and strange at that moment. I’m not sure why the vending machine sounds felt so right, but they really did.

***

That same month, 15 years to the day after Baker and Doc’s first trip to the desert, my boyfriend and I drove out to Big Bend National Park to look for the grave. Tom Alex, the park’s former archaeologist, wrote down its approximate GPS location for us. We drove 5 mph down Old Ore Road, which was so pitted and washed out that the car listed like a ship on rough seas. After a few miles, we pulled over and walked into the desert.

Without a path pointing the way forward, it was easy to feel swallowed up by the desert, the disorienting presence of all that open space. The official report said that Doc dug his grave next to an abandoned stock tank. I had imagined something man-made and substantial. But there was nothing so obvious at the GPS location. “It’s okay,” I said to my boyfriend. “I’ll know it when I find it.” What “it” was, though, I couldn’t have told him. A hole? A stray tent stake? A feeling of doom? I crisscrossed my way across the plateau, thinking about how convicted criminals who express remorse do us all a favor by reaffirming the societal order that they transgressed, and how hard it is to know what to do with someone who insists he isn’t sorry.

We wandered the area for a couple hours until the sun started to set. Twilight moves slowly in Big Bend — the sky is so big that it holds on to light for a long time. But we hadn’t brought any flashlights with us. Maybe, my boyfriend suggested gently, it was time to turn back. There was a slight chill in the air as we walked back to the car, prefiguring the cold night to come. I hadn’t found what I was looking for, but the defeat felt appropriate, somehow. I think what I mean to say is: You can only ever get so close.
Powerful ending. What do you think would’ve been different if you had found the site?
I don’t know – it’s hard for me to say. I have a really vivid memory of criss-crossing the desert, the remoteness of the area, thinking over and over again about what happened. Having a visceral sense of sadness at what happened to Doc that day. I don’t think there’s anything I could’ve found that would’ve changed that that feeling.
Does the last line refer to your own obsession with the story? What do you think you were trying to convey about yourself here?
I remember driving home from Big Bend one day after having spent hours going through the files, high with this particular kind of euphoria that had to do with feeling as though I knew this story better than anyone else – better than the cops, because Baker was being more honest with me (I thought) than he’d been with them; better than Baker, because I had access to all this info about Shannon through the police file. I’ve come to realize that’s a dangerous kind of writerly hubris, and one that can get in the way of telling a story honestly. Sometimes uncertainty and doubt is the most truthful attitude. I think the ending has to do with exactly that realization — that there’s so much I don’t know, will never know, about Baker and Shannon and whatever happened between them that day.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-rachel-monroe-and-have-you-ever-thought-about-killing-someone/feed/0The theme of the week is death, so it’s time to listen to a little Al Green and feel betterhttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-theme-of-the-week-is-death-so-its-time-to-listen-to-a-little-al-green-and-feel-better/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-theme-of-the-week-is-death-so-its-time-to-listen-to-a-little-al-green-and-feel-better/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 15:47:44 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127574Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual ink and paper.

Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and I’m lucky that my days are filled with both. When reading stories, I get inspired by songs I think fit the article’s theme — a soundtrack. To start out, here are a couple of this week’s Storyboard articles, and their soundtracks:

In this 1959 photo, Fidel Castro, then a guerrilla leader, does some reading while at his rebel base in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains.
Andrew St. George/Associated Press

Why’s This So Good? Fidel Castro and the art of the obit. The deck hed says it all: A roundup of some of the top obituaries reveals the craft involved (and, in the case of the long-lived Cuban leader, the endless updating and rewriting). I used to work on the foreign desk of the Los Angeles Times, and the Fidel obit was my constant companion through the years, so much so that I gave it a nickname: Bane of Existence. I suspect it was the same for journalists at newspapers the world over. (I loved the photo that made the rounds on Twitter this week of a proof of the New York Times’ obit from 1971, found in the paper’s morgue.) It was fascinating how a couple of the obits seemed to be making unintended comparisons to Donald Trump in discussing Castro’s genius at manipulation. And I had to use this picture, out of the thousands available: Castro reading a newspaper!

The soundtrack: “Chan Chan,” by Buena Vista Social Club. I know it became a bit unhip to like this Cuban band after their album became the dinner party soundtrack for well-off liberals, but the opening chords of this song — slightly spooky, slightly mournful — will always move me. Plus, that syncopation when they first sing the words Chan Chan, like biting off the end of a cigar. And the moment the horns come in when the song is already half over! Lovely.

Residents look at the crime scene below where Jessica White was shot to death.
Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

Two top New York Times editors talk about the yearlong project “Murder in the 4-0.” It feels a bit like that like Springsteen lyric about “boring stories of your glory days,” but I’m going to mention the L.A. Times again. Its Homicide Report is a true public service, providing “a story for every name” of someone killed in Los Angeles County. And now The New York Times has combined public service with narrative in its yearlong project to write a longform piece for every murder in the city’s 40th Precinct. I talked with City Editor Henri Cauvin, who’s overseeing the “Murder in the 4-0” project, and Metro Editor Wendell Jamieson about the origins of the series, and what they hope to achieve with it. This is a great line from Henri: “We have tried to make each story unique, and the reality is that if you dig deeply enough, just about every murder is its own powerful story.”

The soundtrack: “Welcome to the Terrordome,” by Public Enemy. They may not be a Bronx band, but it’s hard to beat Public Enemy when it comes to summoning the experience of growing up black in New York. The lyrics to this song blow my mind, they’re so intricate and powerful. You know how some songs are poetry? This is one of them.

Deryl Dedmon was convicted in the June 2011 death of ames Craig Anderson in Jackson, Miss.
Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

BuzzFeed News’ Albert Samaha and a modern-day lynching in Mississippi. This is another post in our series from Missouri School of Journalism students called “Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today.” It’s been fascinating to see what source the students are choosing. Surprisingly, many picked stories from The Atlantic; I suppose I’m surprised because it seems so old school, a magazine that’s been around for decades. Others have chosen podcasts, and in this post, Taylor Wanbaugh chose a story from BuzzFeed News, which is making a name for itself outside the listicles that crowd the site like clickbait candy. The flourishing of new outlets for longform is heartening, as is this next generation of journalists.

The soundtrack: “Strange Fruit,” by Nina Simone. Billie Holiday does the most famous version of this stunning song, but it is Nina Simone’s version that I always gravitate toward. Her voice so pained and angry at the same time, like the horn of a train as it races through the southern landscape, her piano chords so simple, a kind of Greek chorus reinforcing her words. I already talked about songs as poetry; this song actually started as one.

What I’m reading online: This week, a Trump ally asserted that there is no longer such a thing as facts. So it seemed a good time to read Truther Love: Uncovering the dating habits of conspiracy theorists and the challenges they face,”by Sabine Heinlein for Longreads. She raises a clever point — if love is about trust, how do people who are consumed by a lack of trust manage to do it? Heinlein faces a difficult balance: showing the absurdity of some of their beliefs without mocking them. Often she just lets them talk, like this quote:

“Truthers really have a hard time right now,” Lorraine continues, “because they have to accomplish a few things: they feel like everything is coming to an end soon, and that the truth is going to be revealed soon. So they are feeling this urgency. And they really want to find a partner to not be alone in this. It would make the journey obviously more enjoyable for them.”

What’s on my bedside table: “My Family and Other Animals,” by Gerald Durrell. It seems like everyone’s writing memoirs these days, so if you’re one of the million or so planning yours, please read this book to see how it’s done right. It’s full of beautiful descriptions and hilarious scenes, but what it captures best is dialogue. Would that all of our families were as witty as the Durrells. I want to move to Corfu circa 1935 and hang out with them! Here’s a little sample, when a boorish boyfriend of the daughter is having tea with the family:

There was another short silence, during which we all sat and watched Mother pouring out the tea and searching her mind desperately for a topic of conversation. At length the Turk turned to Larry. “You write, I believe?” he said with a complete lack of interest. Larry’s eyes glittered. Mother, seeing the danger signs, rushed in quickly before he could reply. “Yes, yes,” she smiled, “he writes away, day after day. Always tapping at the typewriter.” “I always feel that I could write superbly if I tried,” remarked the Turk. “Really, said Mother. “Yes, well, it’s a gift, I suppose, like so many things.”

What’s on my turntable:Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “Have a Good Time,” by Al Green. With all the stories about death this week, it was time for a little feel-good Al Green. Feeling down? Listen to the second song on the album, “Smile a Little More.” It’s like happiness on vinyl. How his voice can soar so sweetly from a growl to this tea-kettle-boiling “eeee!” Bonus: On the back of the album, it gives the address to his fan club (make that International Fan Club) in Memphis. I feel like writing a mash note and seeing if it’s delivered.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-theme-of-the-week-is-death-so-its-time-to-listen-to-a-little-al-green-and-feel-better/feed/0BuzzFeed News’ Albert Samaha and a modern-day lynching in Mississippihttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/buzzfeed-news-albert-samaha-and-a-modern-day-lynching/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/buzzfeed-news-albert-samaha-and-a-modern-day-lynching/#respondThu, 01 Dec 2016 13:40:27 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127262At a time of intense racial tensions in the United States – tensions that visited my own college campus last year – I ran across a story that stopped me in my tracks. In “This Is What They Did for Fun,” BuzzFeed News criminal justice reporter Albert Samaha, covers a modern-day lynching.

Five years ago, James Bradfield’s partner of 18 years, Craig Anderson, was murdered in Jackson, Miss., by white teenagers who ran over Anderson with a truck – apparently because he was black.

Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today

Jacqui Banaszynski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now is an endowed Knight Chair professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Last semester, her Advanced Writing students at Missouri chose stories they liked and gave them the Storyboard treatment. We’re pleased to post their efforts.

Between 1882 and 1968, the story points out, almost 5,000 people, most of them black, were lynched in the U.S.

Samaha’s piece raises a crucial question: Is this startling statistic from our country’s history not left entirely in the past?

His narrative delves into the heart of modern racism and how a family tried to move on from a traumatic loss.

Following is a condensed and edited version of my phone conversation with Samaha.

Tears at testimony in the trial over the killing of James Craig Anderson.
Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

The concept of your story centers on the racial tension in the U.S. right now. How did you find this particular story to tell?

I remember I heard about the lynching way back when it happened. It left my radar for a few years. I was in Mississippi working on another story, and while I was there, I saw that there was a sentencing hearing for these defendants. I dropped by to check it out, and while I was there, I talked to my editor about it. We decided we should try to see who we could talk to and see if there could be a deeper story that hasn’t been told on this. Let’s see what story there is to tell since the four years that it happened.

I think that what also brought my mind back to it was the judge in the case, Judge Carlton Reeves. He wrote a sentencing statement that was really interesting and long and dove into a lot of the themes I ended up addressing in my story. When the sentencing statement came out, it spread around the criminal justice Twitter community and brought attention back to the case. That’s what initially triggered my eyes back to the story.

I know this is a really sensitive story and a serious topic. How did you end up getting access to the sources you talked to? Did you face any major obstacles while you were trying to do that?

The main source of the story was James Bradfield, the husband of the man who was killed. This is one of those stories that could not have been written without his access. I had been trying for months. I think initially he had said he wasn’t interested, and then he said he was, and then he said he wasn’t. He was really thinking about it and wondering if he wanted to share his story. There was probably a three- to five-month stretch where I wanted to do the story and I had begun gathering information, but he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to speak with me. I started working on other stories and just had that on the backburner. The main obstacle was just trying to speak to him. It was his story, and outside of that, there wasn’t much else. That was the story I wanted to tell. Without Bradfield, I wouldn’t have been able to tell it.

I also spent a lot of time trying to contact all the defendants, the ones who are locked up right now, and their family members. There was a lot of door-knocking. I sent a lot of letters. I did speak to some of the defendants in passing. I tried to get as much as I could in the little time that they were willing to grant me on the phone or over email from a federal prison. That was probably the major obstacle I wasn’t able to totally overcome, getting access to the defendants. I got a little bit from that side. But the story really hinged on James Bradfield.

How were you eventually able to convince James to do the story?

That’s a good question. I don’t know, I don’t know what it was. I think that one thing is that when I initially pitched the story to him, I made it very clear that I understood if he didn’t want to do this. I said: “It’s up to you. You can reach out anytime if you decide you do want to.” So maybe it was making it clear that it was his decision and I didn’t want to pressure him.

Also, I think that one thing that helped was that I was in Mississippi for another story. This was after he said that he didn’t want to do the story. I just told him: “Hey, I’m going to be in Jackson. Would you be free to meet? We can talk off the record and you can get a sense of who I am.” So we met at a restaurant and just talked for three hours. It was partially off the record, and then he agreed to go on the record. I think that that really helped, having a no-pressure situation that gave him a chance to meet with me and feel me out and get my vibe before feeling pressured that this was an official thing that was going down.

I liked the part at the very end of the article where you had dialogue between James and his son (De’Mariouz). How did you build that relationship up to that point where you were able to capture details like that? Were you there or was this something he told you about?

A woman holds a poster memorializing James Craig Anderson in front of the federal courthouse in Jackson, Miss.
Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

This was something he told me about. I think a lot of the story is rooted on the relationship between James and De’Mariouz. Building that was just kind of developing their relationship, and their relationship with Craig, and their whole family dynamic and the grief that they went through. That was one of those instances where I heard him tell me that anecdote and I thought, “Oh that’s going to be the end of the story.” It worked narratively in the sense that it thematically captures this idea of finding closure without finding closure. I liked that it wasn’t a neat ending. The ending didn’t suggest that suddenly things are better. I did like the way that, no, De’Mariouz hasn’t forgotten about Craig; he is just trying cope for his father. I like what that said about the relationship.

It also made sense chronologically in the sense that it was a recent event. It was the perfect bookend because it happened on the fourth anniversary and it brought us back to the present. It was one of those moments in an interview where you hear a story and think, “Oh, this is perfect for my lede or this is my kicker right here.” That was definitely one of those instances where it just perfectly caught an intersection of all the different aspects I was looking for and how I wanted to end the story.

What did you hope to accomplish from writing this piece?

Primarily, I wanted to write a good, interesting story that lots of people would read. I think that every writer aims to write something that will touch people in one way or another. I think my aim for this story was not different than my aim for every other story that I write. The big idea: the extent to which this form of racism still exists. It was an important idea to convey. We easily forget. We had our first black president and everyone talks about how we live in a post-racial society and I think it’s easy to forget how recent the Civil Rights era was. A lot of the people with the fire hoses and the dogs are still alive today. A lot of those ideas haven’t died over the course of two generations. This old form of racism is still alive today.

Taylor Wanbaugh comes from the great state of North Carolina and graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in May 2016 with a specialty in magazine journalism. She’s currently working as a consulting writer at an internal PR company in Dallas.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/buzzfeed-news-albert-samaha-and-a-modern-day-lynching/feed/0Two top New York Times editors talk about the yearlong project “Murder in the 4-0”http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-new-york-times-metro-editor-and-city-editor-talk-about-the-yearlong-project-murder-in-the-4-0/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-new-york-times-metro-editor-and-city-editor-talk-about-the-yearlong-project-murder-in-the-4-0/#respondTue, 29 Nov 2016 16:00:42 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127049When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, one of the things that made me the proudest of the newspaper was its commitment to covering every killing in L.A. County with its Homicide Report. In the face of a daunting toll that could easily devolve into statistics, it has been steadfast in personalizing that toll, providing “a story for every victim.”

This year, the New York Times has taken that commitment to a narrative level with its Murder in the 4-0 series, which focuses on the 40th Precinct, “a two-square-mile area at the southern tip of the Bronx where the towers of 14 housing projects dominate the skyline, methadone clinics dot the main thoroughfares, and gangs and drug-dealing wane with each police roundup and then roar back.”

Crime has fallen to historic lows in the city, but homicides persist in the 40th Precinct. The Times decided to commit considerable resources to writing a longform story about each homicide victim in the 4-0 this year, with reporters Ben Mueller and Al Baker taking the lead.

“The idea of focusing on every killing in one precinct appealed to me, because I feared with projects like the Homicide Report and even old New York Newsday’s The Toll, you lose track of the humanity as the number grows higher and ever higher. But going deep on a few seemed to be a compelling way of showing the human cost.”

The result has been a powerful series that has illuminated entrenched problems in the precinct — housing projects awash in violence, distrust between residents and police, haphazard social services. But it has done so not with ivory-tower experts and great swaths of statistics, but by making the killings heartbreakingly personal.

“We have tried to make each story unique, and the reality is that if you dig deeply enough, just about every murder is its own powerful story,” says New York Times City Editor Henri Cauvin, who’s overseeing the project.

Of the 14 homicides so far in the precinct, the Times has published nine stories, the latest of them early this month.

I chatted with Cauvin and Metro Editor Wendell Jamieson about the project. This has been slightly edited for length and flow.

Police investigate the crime scene where Jessica White, a mother of 3, was shot in the chest while sitting in a playground.
Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

So I think I mentioned that I was involved with some of the narratives that came out of the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report. It committed to covering every homicide in the city, to give a face to the faceless. Was that a model for you? Were you aware of it?

Wendell — Oh yes, of course we were aware of it. We admired it. It’s a model that other organizations have experimented with over the years. I remember when I was a police reporter at New York Newsday in the early 1990s, where there 2,000 killings a year in New York City, and we did a daily feature called The Toll, in which we listed every handgun homicide.

Henri — I followed the Homicide Report project, as well as DC Homicide Watch, which started when I was at The Washington Post. I think these sort of efforts all spring from a similar desire to make some sort of sense out of murder, but I think we set out do something different from Homicide Report and Homicide Watch.

Talk me through the creation stage: Who had the idea, and what happened between then and publication? I’d love to be granular here. Tell me everything.

Wendell — I know Henri mentioned it to me one day on the Metro desk, in an offhand sort of way. The more I thought about it, the more I loved it. We’d talked about the Homicide Report before, and had occasionally kicked around similar approaches. But the idea of focusing on every killing in one precinct appealed to me, because I feared with projects like the Homicide Report and even The Toll, you lose track of the humanity as the number grows higher and ever higher.

But going deep on a few seemed to be a compelling way of showing the human cost. And a precinct felt like just the proper geographic decibel-level. We would need to say clearly why we have chosen this precinct, and why it represents the rest of the city, if it does. We considered a few in Brooklyn and the Bronx and chose the 4-0 for several reasons, including that it has many housing projects, and they have become the center of gang-based shootings in New York City.

Henri — You’re always thinking about about how to elevate your coverage, and Wendell had urged me to think about an immersive way to do that on crime and policing, perhaps by embedding a reporter with a crew (gang) in a housing project. As I was thinking about that, I was reading “Ghettoside” (by Jill Leovy, the Los Angeles Times reporter who founded Homicide Report), and I came to think that we could and should try to write about murder in a really deep way, and that we should focus on a place.

But in picking a place small enough that we could really plunge in, in this case a single precinct, it was impossible to know what we were going to end up with. That, of course, was part of what made it compelling — you couldn’t pick and choose. And you had to work with whatever came your way, whether it was one murder all year or a dozen murders, or in our case 14 so far.

I thought the project could be great, and so did the reporters. But with so little control over what we would be covering, I kept my initial pitches modest. I didn’t want to raise expectations too high, too soon. And I didn’t want to have to write a lot of memos and convene a lot of meetings — the sort of things that have ordinarily come with a project of this ambition and depth.

What do you hope to achieve with this project?

Wendell — To paint an unforgettable picture of murder in our city in the year 2016, and to show that even in a low-crime environment, one human being slaying another still upends and forever changes lives.

Residents look at the crime scene below where Jessica White was shot to death.
Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

How does Black Lives Matter play into this project? Is it the conscious backdrop?

Wendell — Actually, no.

Henri — Certainly, we did not sit around and ask ourselves how does The New York Times find a way to jump on the Black Lives Matters movement. But the project is a product of its time, and the last few years in the United States have seen an outpouring of activism — and journalism — around race and the country’s criminal justice system.

“The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander I think heralded a period when a lot of people, including a lot of journalists, began to more openly and aggressively question assumptions about the criminal justice system and to examine the impact of the drug war and mass incarceration. I think The Times has done a lot of good reporting on this over the last few years, but in many cases, the stories weren’t new. We just were paying more attention.

The 4-0 stories do not have an explicitly racial element, but the neighborhood we chose is almost entirely black and brown, and the victims are, in most cases, people whose stories would not have been told, particularly those with complicated pasts that do not easily fit into customary crime-story narratives.

How did you choose the writers? And do they both work on this full time? How many resources are you committing to it?

Wendell — The writers came principally out of our police headquarters bureau. We have three full-time reporters there. We also used a few interns and stringers. Remember, we had to be up there as soon as possible after a killing, no matter the time or day — and it was often the worse time or day for classic newspaper staffing. As the series got bigger and bigger, and as the number of killings jumped a few months into the year, we called in reinforcements. One of them was Jim McKinley, who covers Manhattan Criminal Court but was a former Mexico City bureau chief. He speaks Spanish beautifully, which was a real asset. Some of the photographers have been deeply committed to the project as well, and have acted as reporters in many instances.

We have tried to make each story unique, and the reality is that if you dig deeply enough, just about every murder is its own powerful story.

Henri — We envisioned this as a project that would be led by the beat reporters, and that has been the case. Two of them, Al Baker and Ben Mueller, have been on the project almost full time, but this is NY and the NYPD, so when we’ve had really big news — a wave of corruption arrests, the police commissioner retiring, the bomb blowing up in Chelsea — we had pull them back into the mix for at least a few days. And the third police reporter, Ashley Southall, who came on the beat a couple of months into the project, has worked on both 4-0 stories and on regular police coverage.

And the photographers, particularly Angel Franco and Edwin Torres, have been instrumental. They both grew up in the Bronx and they have embraced the project and the chance to delve deeply into deaths, and lives, that might otherwise be ignored.

Do they trade off on the writing? Or is one of them more the writer and another more the reporter?

Everyone pitches in on reporting, and one person usually take the lead in writing, in part because the pace of the project doesn’t allow for weeks and weeks of writing and rewriting.

Speaking of the writing, my favorite is the one about the party gone wrong. Such lovely writing throughout. Tell me about the writing and editing process on it.

Henri — We have tried to make each story unique, and the reality is that if you dig deeply enough, just about every murder is its own powerful story. In the case of the party and Julian Washington’s killing, Wendell thought that it presented an opportunity to recount a murder from up-close and to do it in a tight, fast-moving way that brought the reader into the room and into the chaos. There were lots of witnesses and lots of different accounts, and we embraced that as an element of the story, because that’s often enough the reality. That approach, focusing almost exclusively on the bloodshed, did mean that Julian’s life story and how it figured in him being in that room that night was not explored in depth and certainly not to the degree that we explored other victims’ lives. And that was certainly a tradeoff.

I wanted to talk about the comments. One of the most moving things about the LAT’s Homicide Report was that people who knew the victims often wrote on the comments board, like a memorial page. It gave them a voice. Have you found that type of comment? More broadly, what kind of reaction have you gotten?

Henri — The NYT moderates comments, so only a small number of stories are opened for comments. By default crime stories, including the 4-0 stories, are not. In the case of the Julian Washington story, they were opened by accident. Some of of the comments that were posted were the sort of ugly rhetoric that we don’t like to attach to a story, especially one that is in some respects an obituary. That said, we did decide to open up a couple of stories for comments — one was the killing of a woman by her husband and the other was a killing of an innocent bystander. The underlying themes of each of those stories — domestic violence and policing in poor communities — were ones that we thought would draw thoughtful comments.

How are you trying to get these stories out to the community? I see you translated two of the stories into Spanish. Are you doing anything else?

We’ve sent a NY push alert for each story and we’ve had a module that allows people to sign up to be notified when the next story publishes. We’ve of course used Twitter and Facebook to share the stories. And yes, we’ve had a couple of the stories translated, both of them in cases where the victims were immigrants from Mexico.

What’s the most gratifying thing about the project? What’s the hardest thing about it?

Henri — It has shown what I think many of us who cover crime know in our hearts, that when you dig into a murder, into the life of the victim and the life of the suspect and the people and places around them, there is a powerful story to be told, and that often the cases we would have been most likely not to write about out turn out to be some of the most interesting and most illuminating stories, like this, this and this.

And I think with the Jessica White story, last month, we were able to begin to show readers in a very real way how murder isn’t treated equally, by the city, by the police or by the press. That’s not a revelation on its own, but again it’s one of those things that’s just been accepted about the criminal justice system. The story depicted this in a very stark way that could not be written off and indeed struck a nerve at Police Headquarters.

As for what’s the hardest thing about this, I think that for the reporters in particular, this is taxing work, emotionally, intellectually and even physically. And it is a marathon, for sure. But the reporters working on this aren’t the types to focus on themselves, and they are daily witnesses to a level of pain few of us have to endure and to a degree of resilience that many of us are never asked to muster. That, I think, keeps everything in perspective.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-new-york-times-metro-editor-and-city-editor-talk-about-the-yearlong-project-murder-in-the-4-0/feed/0Why’s This So Good: Fidel Castro and the art of the obithttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-fidel-castro-and-the-art-of-the-obit/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-fidel-castro-and-the-art-of-the-obit/#respondMon, 28 Nov 2016 16:10:32 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127491Anyone who’s worked in the obituary or foreign news section of a news outlet has a story or two to tell about the Fidel Castro obituary, otherwise known as Bane of Existence. The endless updating and reworking over the years — no, decades. The bylines long gone from the newspaper by the time the Cuban leader finally died. Even the writers whom Castro outlasted.

I know that when I was the features editor (and thus the obits editor) on the foreign desk at the Los Angeles Times, the Castro obit seemed my Sisyphean rock. There’d be a flurry of dire health news, and we’d go racing to get it ready — again. I’d shake my head, suspecting he’d outlive us all. But I’d roll that rock up the hill, just in case.

Because he was such a towering figure, in more ways than one, writers spent a lot of time, and words, on Castro’s obit. The best obituaries are great features at heart, and a few of them dream large and take on the narrative form. I thought I’d give you a few highlights of some of the top obits.

The Miami Herald obituary is the gold standard, not least because he loomed large over the city and its huge Cuban American population. Here’s a particularly nice graf:

His tall and powerful build was matched by an outsized ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds, then helped him survive countless plots hatched by his countless enemies.

The New York Times weighed in (with a mighty thump) at 7,900 words, James Warren notes on Poynter. This section seems to draw silent parallels between Castro and President-elect Trump in their mastery at controlling the narrative — the main difference being Castro’s long-windedness and Trump’s 140-character tweets:

Mr. Castro’s understanding of the power of images, especially on television, helped him retain the loyalty of many Cubans even during the harshest periods of deprivation and isolation when he routinely blamed America and its embargo for many of Cuba’s ills. And his mastery of words in thousands of speeches, often lasting hours, imbued many Cubans with his own hatred of the United States by keeping them on constant watch for an invasion — military, economic or ideological — from the north.

Over many years Mr. Castro gave hundreds of interviews and retained the ability to twist the most compromising question to his favor. In a 1985 interview in Playboy magazine, he was asked how he would respond to President Ronald Reagan’s description of him as a ruthless military dictator. “Let’s think about your question,” Mr. Castro said, toying with his interviewer. “If being a dictator means governing by decree, then you might use that argument to accuse the pope of being a dictator.”

Here’s the aforementioned obituary from the Los Angeles Times, written by longtime foreign correspondent Carol Williams, who left the paper a year ago in the massive buyout that saw nearly a hundred journalists leave. She also points out his genius at controlling the masses:

Castro was masterful amid the people, glad-handing flocks of supports and pumping up nationalist energies. In his signature practice of “direct democracy,” he would rile up a crowd, getting them to chant for an action he had in mind all along, but presenting it as his bowing before the will of the people.

One of the writers of the Washington Post obit, J.Y. Smith, died 10 years before Castro. I love the use of the words “chomping” and “monstrous” in this graf:

Mr. Castro, a romantic figure in olive-drab fatigues and combat boots, chomping monstrous cigars through a bushy black beard, became a spiritual beacon for the world’s political far left.

As usual, British newspapers added a little humor to the obituary. Here’s a great graf from the Guardian.

Like most Latin American leftwingers at that time, Castro was influenced by Marxism – whatever that might mean in the Latin American context, about which Marx himself had little to say.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-fidel-castro-and-the-art-of-the-obit/feed/05 Questions: Pop-Up Magazine’s Doug McGray and the pleasures of live storytellinghttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5-questions-pop-up-magazines-doug-mcgray-and-the-pleasures-of-live-storytelling/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5-questions-pop-up-magazines-doug-mcgray-and-the-pleasures-of-live-storytelling/#respondFri, 25 Nov 2016 16:00:27 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127477In today’s age of distraction, reading an entire longform story in one sitting — never mind an entire magazine —seems like a lost art. Emails, text messages, Facebook notifications and all those open browser tabs beckon, bringing our attention elsewhere every few paragraphs.

Pop-Up Magazine offers people the chance to consume a publication from start to finish, distraction free, in a couple of hours. There’s a catch, though. Pop-Up is a “live magazine,” with reported stories performed in front of audiences. It’s not filmed, recorded or captured in any way, so there’s no way to access it later. It’s an in-the-moment, blink-and-you-miss-it experience.

“It’s a live show that takes its inspiration from the classic ideal of a general interest magazine,” says co-founder and editor in chief Doug McGray.

Reporters, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, artists and other performers (Beck, John C. Reilly, and Lindy West are just a few examples) take the stage to share stories that are often complemented by multimedia components and a live score from Magik*Magik Orchestra.

The show, McGray says, mirrors your typical magazine: “The pieces tend to start off faster, more fun, drawing inspiration from the classic front-of-the-book idea, and then moving into something a little bit more like a feature level.”

“I think it’s an eclectic, pretty young, very curious crowd. We try and make a show that satisfies that curiosity.”

Founded in San Francisco in 2009, Pop-Up started as an event held at a small Mission District theater. Now it sells out 3,000-seat venues across the country in minutes.

Pop-Up made its way to Boston for the first time this month, bringing 10 pieces to life in front of a packed audience at The Wilbur Theatre. The topics and narrators was wide-ranging; emojis, voicemails left for alcohol companies’ customers service departments and the similarities between Curtis Mayfield and Chance the Rapper were among the subjects explored. The performers included “This American Life” producer Stephanie Foo, author and music critic Jessica Hopper, and Ben and Rhonda Partain, a blind couple who told the story of their first date three-plus decades ago.

The Partains were a crowd favorite, as was the closing act, in which documentary filmmaker Tim Hussin shared the story of former opera singer Tim Blevins, who now struggles with addiction, health problems and homelessness. The performance seemed to be ending on a sad note; after Hussin presented clips from his documentary on Blevins for the San Francisco Chronicle, he said he had lost touch with the singer. But then Blevins came onstage and, showing off his booming baritone voice, brought the audience to its feet.

So who is Pop-Up for? “We think of our audience as very curious people,” says McGray, who is also the editor in chief of California Sunday Magazine, a monthly print magazine launched by Pop-Up in 2014. “I think they are people who read a lot of smart stuff and who watch interesting things on TV, on their phone, or in theaters, who listen to great radio, great podcasts. I think it’s an eclectic, pretty young, very curious crowd. We try and make a show that satisfies that curiosity.”

I talked to McGray about Pop-Up Magazine and live storytelling. Here are the edited and condensed excerpts of our conversation:

Now is a great time for the art of live storytelling, whether it’s first-person personal storytelling events like The Moth, variety shows like those put on by “This American Life” or even TED talks. Why do you think we’re seeing more and more of these types of events—from different outlets, across various platforms—in recent years? What accounts for the increasing popularity of live storytelling?

All of those examples are a little bit different. TED is doing a different thing than The Moth is. They’re drawing different communities. They’re working in different genres.

One thing we have found is we all live very full online lives. We get to connect with people all over the place. We have social media friends. We have real people who we’ve had correspondence with for years who we’ve never met, and that’s great. It gives us access to this whole eclectic world of ideas and people.

A really nice complement to that is to go out, turn off the phone for a couple of hours, be somewhere with people, see something live, talk about it afterwards and meet up for drinks. I don’t think that’s a new need. People have been gathering together forever, but I think right now it’s especially nice. It’s not in any way a rejection of or a reaction to our online lives. It’s a very nice complement.

What specifically sets Pop-Up Magazine apart from other live storytelling events?

I think there are a couple of things that are especially distinctive about it. One is how deeply multimedia it is. For most of the stories there is narration. There is also something happening on the screen. We’ll shoot things the way a magazine will.

We’ll commission photography. We’ll commission animation. We commission live music so that there’s a soundtrack underneath the story. Mixing together visual storytelling, narration and a live soundtrack is interesting and pretty distinctive.

Also, it’s primarily not a night of personal storytelling. If we have 10, 11 or 12 stories in a show, we’ll always have a couple of classic memoir pieces in the same way that a magazine might. It’s also made up of profiles, dispatches and even things like lists and essays. Obviously everything has a live spin on it, but we try and have the variety of formats that you see in a magazine and a lot of reporting.

What about participating in Pop-Up is attractive for journalists, especially those coming from print or digital mediums that don’t involve interacting directly with audiences? What can participants take away from the experience and perhaps even apply to their day jobs?

It’s an interesting assignment because you start to think about what kind of story would I report and tell for a live audience? If I have three, four, five, six or eight minutes and a screen and the potential for music underneath me, a band playing next to me. A live audience that will actually laugh at the jokes and I can hear them — in some cases a really large audience. It’s not something that you do all the time.

“That’s one of the pleasures of going to it, which is you can see that the people onstage are all incredibly talented. They’re doing something that is different for them. It’s not their everyday thing. The audience, they have to participate in that. It’s part of what makes it feel intimate, that we’re all in this together.”

I think people who participate in the show really enjoy it. On the one hand, they get to do what they’re good at. They’re onstage because they’re great at finding and telling stories, but then they’re also getting to play around with this new format. We work closely with people, help them think it through, and help make sure it’s a great experience.

Sometimes it gives people a chance to do something completely unlike anything they would otherwise do, [and] because there’s no real template, it gives people a chance to think about stories in a really open‑ended way

I have a good example. About a year ago we introduced Jenna Wortham, who is this great writer for The New York Times who proposed a story.

When we were thinking about our direction for it, we introduced her to Manual Cinema, this really innovative shadow theater company based in Chicago. She wrote this beautiful reported story about memory and our relationships with technology. That’s a very short pathway of describing it, but it is such a really riveting human story that has a lot to do with memory.

Manual Cinema illustrated it live with shadows on stage, shadows that looked almost like animation. If you’re a journalist, it’s not that often that you’re going to have your work illustrated live with shadows and have a band singing with you. That’s not what we do every day. That’s part of the fun.

What is the biggest challenge of putting a Pop-Up Magazine show together?

The biggest challenge is also one of my favorite things about it, which is we’re making it up as we go. I saw Dave Chappelle once and he was talking about standup and how standup required an audience, how you develop your thing. You develop your material in front of an audience. You work it out in public.

This idea of live, multimedia journalism as a way to bring people together is this great experiment that we get to do in public. Every time we do a show, somebody will talk to us afterward about an idea they have, and it’s something we haven’t thought of before. That’s great. It also means that, in the best way, in the most fun way, we’re constantly problem-solving. That’s really the pleasure. That’s one of the pleasures of going to it, which is you can see that the people onstage are all incredibly talented. They’re doing something that is different for them. It’s not their everyday thing. The audience, they have to participate in that. It’s part of what makes it feel intimate, that we’re all in this together.

One unique element of Pop-Up Magazine events is that you invite the audience to go get drinks with the Pop-Up team and the performers following the show. Have you been doing that since the beginning? What’s the motivation behind doing so?

Since the very beginning. The very first show, it was two kegs in the trunk of my car. Whenever the theater has a bar, whenever it has a big enough space we could go together, we always stick around after [or] find some reasonably big bar, very close by and announce on the stage that that’s where we’re going after.

A lot of times you’ll see [similar events] have a Q&A. You can stand up in the back of the room, you can take the mic, and you can ask a question across the vast room to somebody onstage. We had always hoped for a bit more intimacy with the whole show. We want the people to actually meet each other.

One of the things I love is, if you’re in the audience and someone performs this really amazing story onstage and you want to know more about it — it’s some topic you’ve never thought about before, or you just think they’re fascinating and you want to meet them — you walk up to them. Everybody is incredibly friendly.

You can meet performers, you can ask questions. You can also meet other people in the audience. One of the things I love about the show is they draw an incredibly interesting crowd. I’ve met so many interesting people, people as interesting as the people onstage, in the audience at these shows. It’s amazing filmmakers, it’s amazing writers, it’s amazing creative people, designers, architects. People in different sorts of creative fields. It’s people who work in tech and startup companies. It’s lots of really interesting people. That’s the pleasure, too. I think it’s really easy to come to a show and go home having talked to and met a bunch of interesting people.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5-questions-pop-up-magazines-doug-mcgray-and-the-pleasures-of-live-storytelling/feed/05(ish) Questions: Bill Sanderson and the JFK assassination “Bulletins from Dallas”http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5ish-questions-bill-sanderson-and-the-jfk-assassination-bulletins-from-dallas/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5ish-questions-bill-sanderson-and-the-jfk-assassination-bulletins-from-dallas/#respondTue, 22 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127073In this time of political shockers, it seems a good time to revisit the biggest political shocker of the American 20th century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Today is the 53rd anniversary of the killing, and so much separates us from that moment: a sense of innocence lost versus cynicism confirmed; telephones connected by wires versus Bluetooth phones in our ears; a near-monopoly of print, TV and wire services delivering the news versus a dizzying array of digital outlets, from traditional sites to startups to social media.

I think Smith’s experience and knowledge of the beat were critical to his ability to get the assassination story first.

But one thing hasn’t changed: beat journalists at the top of their game.

Which brings us to Merriman “Smitty” Smith, the dean of White House correspondents at the time of the assassination, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the day (for a story that apparently wasn’t touched by his editor — not even the punctuation).

When longtime journalist Bill Sanderson began reporting on Smitty for what became the biography “Bulletins from Dallas: Reporting the JFK Assassination,” he says, “I worried that the story of the JFK assassination had been picked clean — that all the conspiracy theorists and other authors had dug up everything there is to dig up. Was I ever wrong about that.”

The book is full of reporting derring-do that will make journalists’ hearts swell (can I be the first to suggest a “Spotlight”-like movie?): Near-fisticuffs in the press car in the motorcade as Smitty hogged the phone; the wire bulletin that beat the pants off the competition; a clever rewrite guy commandeering the payphone at Parkland Hospital with 1960s technology knowhow; all leading to a day’s-end narrative that will make you catch your breath.

I asked Bill a few questions about the book. Here are some of his answers. (Yes, it’s nowhere close to 5 Questions, or even 5(ish) Questions. But his stories are fascinating.)

Seen through the convertible's windshield, President John F. Kennedy's hand reaches toward his head within seconds of being fatally shot. On that day, the wire car traveled several car lengths behind Kennedy’s limousine, and Merriman Smith was in the front seat.
James Altgens/Associated Press

What made you want to write this book? How did it all begin?

After I left my job at the New York Post in 2013, I looked for freelance writing assignments. One day Faye Penn, at the time an editor at the New York Observer, called and asked me to write something about the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. That led me to track down a number of reporters who were in Dallas that day. I’d long been fascinated by how Merriman Smith of UPI beat the AP reporting the assassination — I first read about it in an article by Patrick J. Sloyan — I decided to use my reporting for the Observer story as a jumping-off point for a book.

When Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy at 12:30 p.m., some reporters thought it was motorcycle backfire, or maybe firecrackers. But Smith recognized the sound right away — gunshots. He grabbed the radiotelephone and called the Dallas UPI bureau. “Bulletin precede,” he yelled. Those two words signaled to UPI that he had news that would supersede the other Kennedy stories he’d filed that day.

Smith is the man who broke the news of the shooting of JFK to the world. Cronkite read HIS dispatch. Tell us a little about what kind of reporter he was and how he pulled it off.

First off — everyone called him Smitty, and I find I lapse into that when I tell his story.

Smitty was the ultimate beat reporter. He started at the White House a few months before Pearl Harbor, and by the time of the Kennedy assassination, he’d been on the beat for 22 years. He knew everybody at the White House — gardeners, butlers, Secret Service agents and everyone else right up to the president himself.

Jim Hagerty, Dwight Eisenhower’s press secretary, said Smith had so many White House sources it was impossible to keep him from learning what was going on. But Smitty knew there was more to covering a beat than good sources. He understood how the White House worked — its habits and rhythms. When news broke that Eisenhower had had a heart attack in Denver in 1955, Smith knew instinctively the White House would soon send a plane there. He called Hagerty right away. Hagerty told him to be at the airport in an hour. Smith was the only reporter aboard that flight. Hagerty said he would have taken others too, but Smith was the only reporter who knew to ask.

I think Smith’s experience and knowledge of the beat were critical to his ability to get the assassination story first.

You’ve got to describe the scene from the press pool car, how Smith claimed the front seat and the fight between Smith and the AP’s Jack Bell.

White House reporters called the pool car the wire car, because it always carried reporters from the AP and UPI wire services. The wire car carried four reporters in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 — Smith, AP reporter Jack Bell, Bob Clark of ABC News and Robert Baskin of The Dallas Morning News. The wire car was equipped with a radiotelephone. In Dallas, the wire car traveled several car lengths behind Kennedy’s limousine. Most of the other 54 Washington journalists on the trip rode buses way at the back of the motorcade.

Smitty was always alert and always had in mind that anything could happen at any time. He didn’t expect anything to happen that day. But just in case, he wanted, as always, to be in the best position to observe and report any news. So he made sure to be in the front seat of the wire car. That would give him a good view of anything that happened. And the radiotelephone’s location next to the front seat meant that if there was news, Smith could grab the phone and tell his editors right away.

Understand it in today’s terms: All the reporters in the motorcade shared one mobile phone — and Smith sat next to it. Another important factor in what happened that afternoon: Jack Bell, who sat in the back seat, was not a White House reporter. He usually covered Congress. Bell didn’t have Smith’s instincts when it came to covering the White House beat.

It also helped that Smitty was what we’d call today a gun nut. He liked hunting and shooting, and he owned several guns and rifles.

When Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy at 12:30 p.m., some reporters thought it was motorcycle backfire, or maybe firecrackers. But Smith recognized the sound right away — gunshots. He grabbed the radiotelephone and called the Dallas UPI bureau. “Bulletin precede,” he yelled. Those two words signaled to UPI that he had news that would supersede the other Kennedy stories he’d filed that day.

Wilborn Hampton, the young reporter who answered the phone, took Smith’s dictation and typed the first dispatch: “Three shots fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade today in downtown Dallas.” This moved on the UPI wire at 12:34 p.m., four minutes after Oswald fired.

Understand it in today’s terms: All the reporters in the motorcade shared one mobile phone — and Smith sat next to it. Another important factor in what happened that afternoon: [The AP’s] Jack Bell, who sat in the back seat, was not a White House reporter. He usually covered Congress. Bell didn’t have Smith’s instincts when it came to covering the White House beat.

After he wrote Smith’s dispatch, Hampton handed the phone to Jack Fallon, who was the top UPI editor in Dallas. Luckily for UPI and Smith, Fallon was one of UPI’s very best writers. His work as a rewriter helped United Press, UPI’s predecessor, win a Pulitzer for reporting the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

As the wire car sped behind Kennedy’s limousine toward Parkland Hospital, Smith stayed on the radiotelephone, talking with Fallon about follow-up dispatches. In the back seat, Jack Bell was apoplectic. He wanted to call the news in to his own office. Bell was so desperate he took several swings at Smith and tried to grab the phone away. Smith scrunched down beneath the car’s dashboard and kept talking.

Smith finally gave up the phone when the pool car arrived at Parkland Hospital at 12:36 p.m., six minutes after the shooting. When Bell picked up the handset and tried to make his call, the line was dead.

AP got its first dispatch from James Altgens, who was the closest journalist to Kennedy’s limousine when the shots were fired. Altgens sprinted back to his office and reported what he saw to his editors. AP’s first dispatch moved at 12:39 p.m., five minutes after UPI’s dispatch. In those days, a five-minute beat on a story as big as the assassination was a big deal. Even worse — because of a quirk in AP’s transmission system, that dispatch didn’t reach newsrooms in Washington or New York until 12:40 p.m., six minutes behind UPI.

You almost seem to have it in for Bell and the AP, showing how they botched it again and again reporting the assassination and the aftermath. Was that merely for dramatic effect, to elevate Smith?

Smitty doesn’t need me to elevate him. And I sure know what it’s like to get beaten on a story. I really feel for Jack Bell. I’m sure being beaten on the assassination ate away at his insides. After the assassination, Bell spent several days in the hospital, and he wrote Smith a vicious letter stating just how he felt about what happened in the wire car.

I never meant to use the AP’s performance that day as a plot device or to build drama. It’s just that as I dug into the story, I couldn’t get around the idea that Bell and the AP bungled the assassination news at every turn.

In the minutes after AP moved its first dispatch, it moved several unreadable dispatches that were garbled by its Teletype operators. That wasn’t Bell’s fault. But while this was going on, Smith and Jack Fallon were putting out a steady stream of clean copy — enough that by 1 p.m. Dallas time, an afternoon newspaper then on deadline had enough UPI copy to print a coherent story.

Bell spent much of his time at Parkland Hospital writing a story on his portable typewriter. Bell thought or was told by his editors that whatever he was writing was more important than gathering news. He didn’t attend the news conference at which the White House gave the official announcement of Kennedy’s death. I can’t be sure, but there may not have been any AP reporters in the room when that happened. The AP was two minutes behind UPI with news of the official announcement.

The White House implored Bell to join the press pool that was going to Love Field to watch Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office on Air Force One. Bell failed to grasp the urgency of this request, and insisted on staying put. Because Bell didn’t go along, no one from the AP witnessed Johnson’s swearing-in. Smith was also asked to join the pool. He went, because he knew that if the White House asked you to join a pool, you went along without asking why.

Bell was one of the best Capitol Hill reporters of his time. But when it came to covering a White House story, he was lost. He didn’t have the experience he needed to keep up with Smith.

Beyond the sheer drama of that day of reporting — it could be a “Spotlight-“type movie — the biggest takeaway from the book is how they managed to get the news out with all the technological constraints. It would stun today’s young reporters, who have the means to disseminate information in their own hands. Talk me through some of the hoops they had to jump through, like clearing the broadcast wire.

I don’t think people in that era saw the technology as constrained. It was what they had. It only seems constrained from where we sit in 2016.

At the wire services, the system essentially worked like this: AP and UPI reporters working in the field had to find a phone and call news in to their bureaus. Once reporters were on the phone with their bureaus, transmission could be instant. You’d give your story to a writer. The writer would hand the finished copy to an editor. The editor would hand it to a puncher, someone who typed the story onto punch paper tape which was fed into a Teletype machine.

When all the links in the system worked together, it spread news quickly. Smitty’s first dispatch from the pool car was on the UPI A-wire four minutes after Oswald fired his shots.

One of my favorite anecdotes is how one reporter was sneaky and managed to keep phone lines to the bureau open while reporting from the hospital. Tell us how he did it.

Wilborn Hampton — the guy who took down Smitty’s first dispatch in the UPI Dallas bureau — was sent to Parkland Hospital. He wanted to make sure UPI had a dedicated phone line at the hospital that no other reporter could steal. So he found a payphone in the hospital lobby, called an editor, and gave the editor the payphone’s number. Then Hampton hung up, and the editor called him back.

Hampton made this play based on his knowledge of the 1960s-era phone system. He knew that a phone call would stay alive until the party who made the call hung up. So even if he hung up the pay phone at the hospital, the phone would stay connected to the UPI Dallas bureau as long as the editor in the bureau did not also hang up. You could have brought a pocketful of dimes to the hospital pay phone, but it would have been useless to you as long as the UPI editor remained on the other end of the line. That’s how Hampton made sure to keep an open line to his office. He used that phone to report the official announcement of Kennedy’s death.

OK, one more technological tidbit. You say Cronkite he had to deliver the first bulletin off-camera because TV studio cameras took 20 minutes to warm up! Did you know a lot of this kind of stuff beforehand, or was it one of the fun things you kept learning while researching the book?

That came up in my research. I understand that after the assassination, CBS made sure to always have a news studio camera warmed up and ready to go.

The front pages of seven British newspapers headlining the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Associated Press

Besides the obvious technological advancements, how do you think reporters of Smith’s era differ from those of today?

Dallas TV stations were so excited about Kennedy’s visit, they broadcast his airport arrival live. Before Kennedy’s plane landed, they showed the reporters getting off the press plane. When I saw this, I thought: It’s a bunch of old white guys. Most of them were very experienced reporters. Smitty covered the White House for 22 years before Dallas, and he stayed on the beat nearly seven more years before his death. That was typical. There were plenty of Washington reporters with even more experience than Smith.

Reporters on campaign planes today come from more diverse backgrounds. They also seem younger than they were in Smitty’s time. It seems like there are about as many reporters covering national politics as ever. But fewer of these reporters have attained Smitty’s level of experience.

But the real problem isn’t the quality of reporters today. It’s that there are too few of them. Not enough reporters cover statehouses, city halls, schools and state and local news in general. Maybe because I was a statehouse reporter in two states, I find the shortage of people covering state government appalling. State government often has a bigger impact on people’s lives than anything that happens in Washington. And there are terrific government stories to be covered closer to where readers live. It’s a shame that the economy doesn’t support more good local news reporting.

What could Smith teach young journalists starting out today?

Cover your beat closely. If you cover the courthouse, know the judges and lawyers as well as the guy who runs the cafeteria or shoeshine stand. If you cover the statehouse, know the clerks and lobbyists. A lot of the people you meet covering a beat don’t make news, but they do know and hear things you and your readers want to know. Smith knew everyone in the White House, including lots of people whose names never appeared in his stories. He put his sources and knowledge to work every day.

But I think the more valuable lesson from Smith’s career is to people who own newspapers or news websites: They need to invest in their staff. UPI invested heavily in Smitty, and it paid off with a Pulitzer Prize and a five-minute beat on one of the 20th century’s biggest stories. The assassination was just one of his successes. Day in and day out, Smith provided plenty of interesting stories that UPI’s newspaper and broadcast clients found valuable to audiences. Smith was very popular at the newspapers that made up the bulk of UPI’s customers. One of Smitty’s friends told me his bosses knew what they had, and worked hard to keep him happy.

As an editor, I can’t get over your description of the editing process for the 2,800-word story that won him the Pulitzer. I.e., no editing whatsoever! You say that not even his punctuation was changed. Even though that’s hard to imagine, I love the editor’s line: “You’ve got to know when to leave it alone.” I think that’s great advice. What’s your own takeaway from this anecdote?

The story has a lot of nice writing touches. I especially like the part where Smitty writes that a detective stopped him as he ran across the tarmac at the Dallas airport on his way to LBJ’s swearing-in. “You dropped your pocket comb,” the detective said. What a fun little detail. It works so many ways — it breaks up the tension of the story; it lightens its mood a bit.

I think editing is analytical, and when you analyze something you tend to find flaws in it. I’m not sure whether Smith’s editor found the writing to be flawless, or that he decided to overlook the flaws he did find.

But what’s interesting to me about this anecdote isn’t that Smith’s editor left the writing alone. It also appears that Smith’s view of his audience was in tune with his editors. He and his editor concurred on what needed to be in the story as well as how it had to be written. When his editor said, “You’ve got to know when to leave it alone,” I think he was talking about more than Smith’s writing. He was saying that Smith’s reporting addressed what readers wanted to know.

I think the more valuable lesson from Smith’s career is to people who own newspapers or news websites: They need to invest in their staff. UPI invested heavily in Smitty, and it paid off with a Pulitzer Prize and a five-minute beat on one of the 20th century’s biggest stories.

As a narrative fan, I love how Smith applied the techniques of longer-form journalism to news. You have this passage about JFK adviser Ted Sorenson’s tears and say, “It was the kind of detail in which Smith specialized during his career as a White House reporter. It was a bit of information that conveyed the emotion of what happened and put Smith’s readers in the middle of what was going on that tragic day.” Can you talk a little about that?

Smith was good at digging up anecdotes of White House life that readers would easily relate to.

I found a good example of this in a story Smith wrote in October 1946 about President Truman’s plans to hold a series of state dinners amid a national beef shortage. “Unless President Truman does something about the meat situation soon, the White House social season may be a caloric flop … The White House is having trouble like virtually every other household in America in getting meat.” Everyone could relate to Truman’s problems serving meat on White House china. Details like that humanize presidents and their policies.

Soon after Dwight Eisenhower took office, Smith started writing a gossipy twice-weekly column called Backstairs at the White House. “I tried to print as much froth about Ike as I could, largely because I thought the public wasn’t getting a very close view of him,” Smitty said. Early Backstairs columns talked about trivia like how Eisenhower snarled a fly-fishing line in some shrubs, whether he’d play golf during a summit meeting in Bermuda, or his complaints about pigeons at his Gettysburg farm. None of this was earthshaking. But Smith knew people were interested in the day-to-day details of presidential life, and in White House gossip.

I agree that little human details are a help if you’re writing a narrative story. But I viewed this from my background as a tabloid reporter. People love to read about other people and what they say and do. Page Six at the New York Post runs all kinds of items similar to those Smith dug up for his Backstairs columns. This kind of reporting puts readers closer to the people they are reading about. I think digging up anecdotes and tidbits like Sorenson’s tears is simply good reporting, whether they’re used to support long narratives or short items in gossip columns.

What’s the most fascinating thing you learned while researching the book?

When I started the research, I worried that the story of the JFK assassination had been picked clean — that all the conspiracy theorists and other authors had dug up everything there is to dig up.

Was I ever wrong about that.

Smith’s story had not been fully told. The basic story of how he hung on to the phone in the wire car is fairly well known, but the details of how he got himself in the right place at the right time to dominate the assassination story are not. And he’s never been the subject of a biography.

I wonder what else we don’t know about what happened that day. I think we are so focused on whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that we’ve lost track of what the assassination means to us as a cultural event. Two cataclysmic news stories have happened in my lifetime. One was 9/11, and the other was the JFK assassination. Social scientists found it useful to compare people’s reactions to 9/11 to public opinion research conducted after the assassination. Conspiracy theories are still the main focus of most people who write about the Kennedy assassination. But they’re just part of the story. I think we’ve got some way to go toward sorting out the cultural impact of what happened that day in Dallas. Smitty’s story is one piece of that puzzle.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5ish-questions-bill-sanderson-and-the-jfk-assassination-bulletins-from-dallas/feed/0Adventures in storytelling, from old-school noir to new-school memoirhttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/adventures-in-storytelling-from-old-school-noir-to-new-school-memoir/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/adventures-in-storytelling-from-old-school-noir-to-new-school-memoir/#respondFri, 18 Nov 2016 16:00:37 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127353Just in time for the weekend, here’s a little list of some of the things I’ve been listening to and reading this week, some of it online — Storyboard included, natch — and some of it on vinyl or actual ink and paper.

Two of my biggest loves are narrative journalism and music, and I’m lucky that my days are filled with both. When reading stories, I get inspired by songs I think fit the article’s theme — a soundtrack. Here are a couple of this week’s Storyboard articles, and their soundtracks:

A slide from "Fragments of a Life," a New York Times Facebook Live feature.
The New York Times

Old meets new: the power of a Facebook Live experiment with Kodachrome. This week we spotlighted new forms of storytelling on Storyboard, which delights me no end. As someone with steampunk tendencies (a fondness for the anachronistic combined with an embrace of technology), I cheered that this Facebook Live experiment by New York Times writer Deborah Acosta used cast-off Kodachrome slides as its narrative spark. Here’s how our writer Allison Eck sets it up: “Acosta immediately went live on the New York Times’ Facebook page (with its fairly jaw-dropping 12 million followers). In real time, she revealed the discarded contents of a life: yellowed envelopes, images of planes, frigid terrains — and a woman. This was a mystery, but not your typical whodunit: No one had been hurt, no one was seeking revenge, no one was trying to expose a criminal. But who would ditch such beautiful slides? And why so deliberately?” Allison cleverly interspersed actual Facebook Live comments with her own commentary, creating an interactive vibe that mirrors the story itself.

Kodachrome
They give us the nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day

An image from The Bible Went Down With the Birdie Jean.
Randy Potts

Why’s This So Good? Randy Potts and the Bible Went Down With the Birdie Jean. Instagram is one of the most exciting places out there right now for new kinds of storytelling. Yes, there are a million pictures of cute puppies and sunsets, but adventurous writers like Randy Potts are using the form and running with it. Over the fall, Potts has serialized his memoir about growing up the gay grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts. In rapid-fire installments, he’s used beautiful stream-of-consciousness essays, images and videos to tell a story of pain and empowerment. I love this bit from the post’s writer, Tom Haines: “From one post to the next, Potts harnesses the episodic experience of Instagram with purposeful freedom. His writing at times evokes that of James Agee, in which words with fierce pace take a moment in time and twist it around and set it down, showing what had been but not seen. He cites passages from the Bible (Psalm 31: 9-11, Ecclesiastes 9:4-7) and pages from a personal journal written 11 years ago. He writes in first person and third. He translates poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke) and crafts his own. He investigates and remembers and explores the terrain between.” I also love that Potts tweeted he’d turned Storyboard pink for the day. Yes!

What I’m reading online: In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the New Yorker brought out the big guns(figuratively, of course), commissioning essays from some of the most well-known and respected writers around today: Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, George Packer, Junot Díaz, Gary Shteyngart, Evan Osnos, Jill Lepore, Atul Gawande — and that’s just half of the list. It’s a stunning collection. Here are few snapshot quotes from the essays to draw you in:

For decades, the nice and the good have been talking to each other, chitchat in every forum going, ignoring what stews beneath: envy, anger, lust. — Hilary Mantel

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? — Toni Morrison

Social media in the era of Trump is essentially Leningrad, 1979. — Gary Shteyngart

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. — Junot Díaz

What’s on my bedside table: I’m a big fan of the L.A. noir writing of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and have read most everything they’ve written. (I’m not sure I’ll ever get through all of Macdonald’s work. That man was a writing machine.) Although I’ve read “The Thin Man” a million times (a brilliant book), for some reason I’d never read Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,”the most famous book in the San Francisco noir canon. Wow — Sam Spade makes Philip Marlowe look almost soft. In the first few chapters his partner is killed, and you learn Spade is having an affair with his wife, a scene that ends with a distinct lack of mourning for his dead pal (and rival) only a few hours after his death: “He stood up and put on his hat. ‘Have the Spade & Archer taken off the door and Samuel Spade put on.'”

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “The Race for Space,” by Public Service Broadcasting.This week I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest’s most excellent (and topical) new album, “We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service.” Highly recommended. The first song, “The Space Program,” uses the NASA program as a launching point for a meditation on racism. It made me think of this album, by a band that uses newsreel and other historical soundbites in its music — a sampling of a very different kind from A Tribe Called Quest. The songs track the arc of the space race, from its inception through its failures to its euphoric landing of a man on the moon. In light of the ATCQ song, I suppose I shouldn’t admit how much this album moves me; perhaps it’s because the band are masters at storytelling, using narrative tension and explosions of emotion to great effect. A bonus: I had forgotten the vinyl was clear plastic, making it seem like the moon itself.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/adventures-in-storytelling-from-old-school-noir-to-new-school-memoir/feed/0Why’s This So Good? Randy Potts and “The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean”http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-randy-potts-and-the-bible-went-down-with-the-birdie-jean/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/whys-this-so-good-randy-potts-and-the-bible-went-down-with-the-birdie-jean/#respondThu, 17 Nov 2016 16:00:47 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=127066I follow the journalist Randy Potts on social media, so I had known for weeks that he was planning to launch “The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean,” a serialized, reported memoir about life as the gay grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts, on Instagram. Then late on a Sunday evening in early September, when I settled into a chair and tapped on the Instagram icon on my iPhone, it suddenly was there: a post by @thebirdiejean.

The photo in the post was an intentionally overexposed image of an open book, one side showing verse (“He came from somewhere just like all of us…”) and the other a young woman posing, arm raised, on a costumed elephant. White script in the corner of the photo read “3/33.” I stopped. Potts had already posted the first two posts in the opening series, which he was calling “the book of Mother,” so I flicked my thumb across my iPhone screen until I came to the first post, and there I saw these words by Potts, the beginning:

the day “Grandma Birdie” died went like so: her first grandchild, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, was shy too shy: “Grandma Birdie” demanded L sit in her lap and L refused, hiding behind me. “No!” she shouted, and that was that: Christmas was over.

.

All that follows is true.

.

But first, know this: I remember the second time Oral Roberts disowned his baby girl. I remember when he dressed…

An image from The Bible Went Down With the Birdie Jean.
Randy Potts

I read to the end and clicked to see the others in the series. Potts was posting quickly by then — 4/33 and 5/33 were already there — and I found myself swept up in this moment of publication, trying to keep up one post after the next. Images: performers in drag on stage at Fat Mary’s Lounge; a black-and-white photo of Potts’ young mother in a park, toddler Randy in her lap; a Youtube video of two men on guitar covering “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Words: memories of mother, and origins of a name; of Oral Roberts, the grandfather; of childhood pain in the Pentecostal cradle; of divorce and early days as an openly gay man.

His posts make for a rich realization of the open-ended narrative conjured by Jorge Luis Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which so much is waiting to be chosen and explored. Hashtags at the end of each post offer entry into another world…. But what makes Potts’ long-form Instagram storytelling especially powerful is that the story itself transcends distraction, with the individual images and essays compelling a reader across a longer arc.

Instagram allows users to type 2,000 characters, roughly 400 words, beneath a photo. Post 20/33 featured a blurred snapshot of children on a walkway surrounded by blackness, as though a receding dream. After noting a date (“Summer 2007”) a place (“Katy Trail, Dallas, Texas,”) an age (“33”), and principal actors, his children (“L: Age 8, Z: Age 6, E: Age 4”) Potts quotes song lyrics by Sinead O’Connor, then describes himself:

He’d not chosen the confusion of his 20s: the marriage to a woman – his best friend – and the tug of other men – the desire to gaze upon them – and the wishing it would go away because: it reminded him of the attentions he’d been unable to refuse too many times too many years before. It was years of therapy before he felt he could breathe before he felt he could say, out loud, in the kitchen, by himself, “I’m gay,” in what might have been his first declarative sentence.

I had been scrolling from one post to the next for an hour or more that first night, and I felt like Instagram reader @dos771, who commented: “Reading this is sort of scary, like going under the knife of a surgeon, but it’s also liberating, like when the surgery is desperately needed and long overdue. Can I say, painful but healing? Okay, catching breath, and back into the operation room.” And then, @thebirdiejean, replying: “Thanks @dos771 I’m really appreciating your wonderful comments.”

Potts looks outward, too, using his journalist skills to research his grandfather Oral’s famous past and to interview the mother of a gay soldier who died in Afghanistan while serving under the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. The result is a story at once personal and universal. An “anthem,” one reader called it.

Potts has already posted four installments — “the book of Mother,” “the book of Oral,” “the book of the Compound,” “the book of Munna” — with five more coming in the weeks ahead. Each book explores a central character in his life, and from one post to the next, Potts harnesses the episodic experience of Instagram with purposeful freedom. His writing at times evokes that of James Agee, in which words with fierce pace take a moment in time and twist it around and set it down, showing what had been but not seen. He cites passages from the Bible (Psalm 31: 9-11, Ecclesiastes 9:4-7) and pages from a personal journal written 11 years ago. He writes in first person and third. He translates poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke) and crafts his own. He investigates and remembers and explores the terrain between.

A diorama featured in The Bible Went Down With the Birdie Jean.
Randy Potts

His posts make for a rich realization of the open-ended narrative conjured by Jorge Luis Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which so much is waiting to be chosen and explored. Hashtags at the end of each post offer entry into another world. Comment by readers prompts curiosity about the person behind the handle, only a click away. Hyperlinked headings offer nested narrative order — #InsidetheWestboroCompound, #HomosexualVerse, #ThePortionofMineInheritance, for example — but also a path away from the main thread of the story being told.

But what makes Potts’ long-form Instagram storytelling especially powerful is that the story itself transcends distraction, with the individual images and essays compelling a reader across a longer arc. “The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean” is vivid proof that multimedia platforms and social networks can deliver what great literature always has. As Faber, the professor living in a world without bound volumes in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” notes: “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.”

“The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean” resumed Sunday with “the book of My Baby Brother.” In a tweet beforehand, Potts wrote: “Sexual abuse, guns, cemeteries: next week’s installment will be intense.”

When @kthysvg stumbled upon the work-in-progress, she asked: “How can I read the book?” Replied @thebirdiejean: “you can read it as each photo is posted or wait a few days and read it all at once.”

I think it’s best to begin at the beginning, with “the book of Mother,” which now rests at the bottom of the @thebirdiejean Instagram feed. There, Potts confronts action and consequence:

It was, after all, what we heard in church and what we read in the Bible: we were the Army of the Lord. Outside obedience, demons were waiting to drag little children to hell. Maybe the first commandment was love; the second, surely, was this: put on the full armor of God – “train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it” – promises.